Unseen Cultivator

In autumn, Qing Liao unleashed death. All through the winter, as the creatures of the basin huddled together in search of warmth and fleas jumped from one furry form to the next, the horrid ending spread far and wide. Brutal and swift, it transformed the basin in a profound way. What began with beavers soon spread to other rodents. Rats, somehow, endured, but mice, marmots, voles, and other animals perished in droves. Rabbits, squirrels, and even many weasels also gave in to the pestilence. Many monkeys too, seeking meat in the snow, took the fleas onto their skin and succumbed in whole bands thereafter. Wild cats, civets, and eventually even the larger dholes and wolves suffered as their needed prey collapsed in number. Famine followed plague, among animals just as among humans.

Liao, wandering about the now swamp-studded basin, felt this shift spread slowly across the land, a black, oily blot upon the qi of the region, it laid down heavily upon him day after day as he gathered food and slept in shelters of piled brush. It was a natural process, a part of the wild world he'd merely accelerated. He told himself this dozens of times each day.

Sayaana did her best to offer such succor as she could. Expansion of beaver populations, outbreaks of disease that slaughtered all small animals, these things happened, again and again, measured across a cycle of decades and centuries. Liao knew this, had heard the tales from his father and the other old trappers. He clung to it, wrapping those words around his core as a desperate last layer of armor.

But it still hurt.

The swamp waters churned with frost and wind, and every day tossed up broken bodies. Twisted by the plague, these black and broken corpses covered in horrid wounds were left untouched by all. Not even the vultures would consume them. Moving about, circling from place to place while monitoring and spreading the destruction, Liao could not avoid seeing them. He even had to take comfort in those corpses, for when he did not find them that meant the plague had not spread sufficiently and he needed to trap and dose with fleas once more, boosting its power.

All that time, as he worked, he labored under the fear that the devastation, that the widespread march of death across stream, swamp, and tarn, would reveal the entire plan to those waiting high above. The death, the brutal shift of qi from vibrancy to malaise, was something that the demonic cultivators could not possibly fail to observe. Had they investigated, the entire flood plot might well have unraveled.

That this calamity did not come to pass, Liao eventually realized, mostly came down to luck as to the nature of their current opponents. The enemy of this hour was tied to the desolate dao of ice and snow. They did not consider this perturbation of the forest's qi flows as anything of significance. The death of huge numbers of tiny animals, and the ripples this threw across the basin, were something they simply ignored.

A different group of demonic cultivators would not have been so easily fooled. Black Howl, the predatory beast who had fallen in the previous incursion, would surely have noticed. A wolf of a man, he'd have smelled out and stopped the scheme in mid-motion. It would take minimal effort. The critical dams, if broken early while the ground remained chill and the snow buried the peaks beneath its steady white blanket, could be drained away and the flood reduced to nearly nothing with a mere handful of immortal-strength blows.

Liao, knowing this vulnerability, spent the winter months wracked with worry. Barely able to cultivate at all, he sheltered beneath the snow and waited for spring with growing desperation. Only his monthly reports, dropped into the pond, offered him any solace or sense of progress.

Ice, however, welcomed death. Those above, marshaling their mass of demons through endless cajoling and qi manipulation, thought nothing amiss. Instead, the quartet of demonic cultivators took actions that, in a fortunate twist of fate, made the flood to come all the more potent.

Snow Feast's consumptive whirlwind stripped river valleys of cover, strengthening the rush of silt soon to flow down their sides. Ice Wraith and Desolation Gale worked powerful rituals high in the sky, filling the winter days with thick clouds that launched blinding blizzards. The snow that followed fell deeper and accumulated higher than any Liao had seen in more than a century of wandering the land. This repository of fluid for the melt to unleash could not have been better placed to supply the flood attack. As for Ocular Shard, the vengeful cultivator, acting according to no pattern any observer might discern, periodically hurled huge rocks from high above into tall mountains. The avalanches such actions triggered dislodged huge piles of snow and filled the reservoirs behind the beaver dams to nearly bursting.

Cold and snow did nothing to stop the advance of the demons, of course. Snow Feast and his allies drove them relentlessly. Exactly how this was done, Liao could not have said. It seemed to him to be based on some kind of dominance play, the presence of a stronger entity tied to the plague able to push those far weaker forward through pure presence. Whatever the mechanism, the resulting push was not especially efficient. Masses of ghouls scrambling over the snow-covered swamp-riddled landscape made for a terrible mess, with all the foibles and struggles attendant to a grand cattle drive imposed upon countless, red-shaded humanoid forms.

The demons were largely heedless. They would charge over the edges of cliffs, tumble down landslide slips to slam against the rocks below and trample each other crossing river rapids. Durable as they were, able to pull themselves together even after shattering every limb, this destructive press claimed the lives of numerous ghouls and even a handful of ogres. They had no mercy or even recognition of each other's suffering, relentlessly trotting atop each other in the press. Demons smashed down in the rush might never rise again. Others crawled forward broken for weeks afterwards.

Throughout autumn and winter, Snow Feast managed to force nearly one hundred thousand demons per month into the basin's confines, forming a horde well over a million strong. Losses were high. As many as one ghoul in twenty perished, mostly lost to falls when pushing over the rough mountains. Liao found such wastage gruesome, but he cheered it silently all the same. Fifty thousand demons lost to the march meant that many less available to charge the Starwall should he fail.

The vast gathering of demons came to choke the basin with ghouls as the months passed, especially in the eastern portion of the landscape near where the gateway lay. Liao was obligated to hunker down and wait for spring beneath his shelters as the vast bulk of the horde lurched past. The ghouls did not gather in formation or form up as some storybook army might. Instead, they ran through the forest like some absurdly vast herd of red-painted deer, but they had all too many eyes and ears to easily evade.

Only when they had passed eastward was it safe to move about again.

He spent the darkest months sheltering beneath the snow, dug deep with a coating of ice above his head. At one point, shortly after the solstice, a ghoul walked directly over where he lay in the night. A disconcerting encounter, but one that also served to restore confidence. So long as he was neither spotted nor heard directly, he retained the freedom to move about even with demons on all sides.

A necessary ability, come spring. The change of seasons arrived soon enough, during the first week of the fourth month, an ordinary timeframe.

Five days of bright sunshine, unbroken by any clouds, signaled the coming of spring. The basin warmed at great speed. Snow melted, huge banks of white vanished. Rivulets gathered into streams and pools that melted even more snow in turn. Sodden ground, unable to take even a single drop more, forced the flows overland. Streams, rivers, and reservoirs filled to the very edge of bursting.

Liao watched, and knew this was absolutely the moment. He saw the sky and watched the weather turn. Storm clouds gathered as the Celestial Mother kindly chose to grant her servant the blessing of a heavy spring rain that began shortly after midnight on the sixteenth day of the fourth month.

The moment of the strike had come.

To unleash a great, tsunami-like flood that would sweep out toward the sea required that he bring down a series of critical dams, moving from west to east and propagating the wave to ever-greater heights as carefully calculated and modeled through delicately fashioned dioramas. Liao knew the sequence and the timing.

He also knew the tolerances were extremely tight. Five dams, hundreds of kilometers apart; all must be destroyed in a single day. They were primed to break, a simple matter of shattering support posts from beneath the waters, but they were not unguarded.

He would need to charge toward the heart of the gathering horde, and he dared not be spotted at any point.

"Once you start, do not stop," Sayaana provided the final instruction and encouragement. "Evade and race, no halting, none."

Liao silently acknowledged this. There was no other way. He might well be detected by ghouls only to outrun them, and he was, from the moment he began, trapped in a race with rising water at his back that would only end when he reached the safety of the towering ridges to the east beyond the gateway.

For this grand, grim day of running and smashing his chosen weapon was neither blade nor bow, but his shovel. The true blow would come from the waters gathered by the labor of thousands of furry allies who had offered the ultimate sacrifice to strike a blow against the plague. "For the first time in this war," he murmured at first light in the hopes of finding humor in what might well be his final hours given the chances of detection. "The orthodox have a horde of their own." That it was made of liquid was inconsequential to its prospects of success.

He placed his bow in a storage bracelet, and his other tools and most of his clothing joined in there shortly after. All potential impediments to movement underwater were discarded. Liao girded himself in no more than boots, trousers, and shirt. His daggers were strapped to his belt, and he held his shovel in his hands. The diamond-shaped blunt blade Neay had given to him was, in that moment, the most potent weapon he'd ever carried.

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Standing atop the first of the dams just as the sun peaked through the gap far to the east where the great river descended into the gorges beyond the basin, Liao wrapped both hands around the shovel, channeled his qi, and jumped into the reservoir behind the dam.

Simple, the necessary process. A series of support posts lay at fixed intervals to hold the dam's structure anchored to the bedrock. These must be shattered one by one, and then a vast gash gorged through the foundation in order to induce a rapid collapse over the next hour or so as the structure fell apart through its own immense weight and the massive pressure of the water behind it. Two steps only, both easy to comprehend.

But simplicity did not account for scale. The first dam stretched nearly four hundred meters end to end. Each of the forty bracing posts was thicker around than Liao's legs. The facing front of the dam averaged more than a dozen meters in thickness of layered tree trunks and heavy branches reinforced by mud, moss, masticated wood chips, and more. All of it was holding back murky river water so choked with silt it was black as pitch below the surface; all light lost barely a half meter down.

Any ordinary human would have looked upon that structure and claimed that one hundred men, with oxen to aid them, would need weeks to tear it down.

Qing Liao, now in the sixth layer of the thought weaving realm, gathered his qi and shattered the first post to splinters with a single powerful swing of his shovel. Kick, push, and swing, a single three-move combination maneuver that carried his from one post to the next in no more than a single heartbeat, consumed his complete focus. Support after support was obliterated as he moved down the line. He remained underwater throughout the process. Fish and ducks fled the shockwaves unleashed by these heavy blows, thunder from the muck.

Reaching the end, he rose to the surface once, took a single deep breath, and then plunged back down to the bottom. Cloaking the shovel in qi, sharpening the edge with invisible power to form a diamond-hard blade, he plunged the tool into the superstructure up to his grip point, a meter and a half of leverage embedded in the heart of the dam. Placing both feet on the bottom of the artificial lake, he grasped this demolition bar with both hands and charged forward.

The shovel bucked and fought against his ironclad, qi-reinforced grip. Wood and mud parted before the empowered steel blade. A great gash tore open, parting the wooden construct like a scissor sliding through an old rag. Water rushed into the gap, slamming through hard into every opening. Breaking and cracking, it sought to push eastward in accordance with the absolute demands of gravity. The dam buckled, cracked, and began to give way.

Liao had no time to observe the slow slide toward destruction. He could only sense the shift in the surrounding water, the massive perturbations unleashed by this bulk motion, and race onward. There was no time to waste. Placing his shovel across his shoulders he vaulted from the water and bolted into the forest. The zigzag line of light offered by the Stellar Flash Steps propelled him forward, a flickering courier of destruction charting a stutter-step path toward watery ruin.

The swampy forest did not offer the least impediment to his progress. Liao knew its ways intimately. He made his moves between the great trees, across stagnant lakes, through choking reed stands, and over windblown clearings without ever hesitating or slowing. The ground blurred in his path, and he outraced the geese spurred by his passage.

The wild only sped him along, aiding rather than opposing his charge.

The demons, by contrast, presented themselves as obstacles in great number.

Liao encountered his first ghoul halfway to the second dam. A slicker-flick of his daggers ripped both sides of the monster's neck apart, slicing clear down to the vertebrae, without demanding more than an instant of angular adjustment of his path.

As he moved, he recalled the previous horde, watching Su Yi ping back and forth from one demon to the next. Now, though he lacked her grace, he possessed the power to emulate some of that approach.

Two ghouls before he reached the second dam. One slain, the other simply bypassed by a single flash step to the north.

He reached this second objective two hours past dawn.

Five hundred meters of assembled timber, it was more durable than the last. Liao had to smash posts and cut a gouge both in front and behind. This took nearly ten minutes and by the time it was done he felt the qi drain growing upon his reserves.

He pulled a pill out from the storage ring on his right wrist, prepared months ago by Zhou Hua, and popped it into his mouth. A rush of energy followed at once as the invigoration the alchemical mix unlocked drew qi out from the compressed reserves of his dantian in a rush and pushed it all through his body to replenish his stamina. Fatigue all but vanished, and his qi rapidly rose to nearly his normal active ready state.

There were six more such pills in the ring. That should be more than enough to make it to the end of the day, but if he was forced to take them all he'd be left immobile for three or more and weak as a mortal besides. An acceptable trade-off, one Liao did not mind in the least, but it made the time limit utterly critical. There would be no going back to make corrections later, and if he was trapped by the demons, fatigue would prevent any last-second escapes.

Liao refused to even consider that possibility. He had worked too long and too hard to stop now. He would complete the mission, with all its many sacrifices, no matter how many demons stood in the way. If they would not move, he'd simply cut through them.

Two more hours to reach the next dam. Six demons this time, all of them slowly wading through the marshes on the way east. Liao vaulted in behind one and decapitated it, swam beneath another to disembowel it, jumped down onto two and severed their necks from the trees above, crept up to one from behind through the reeds to stab it in the heart, and simply shattered the skull of the final one by throwing a conveniently placed rock through its head.

He found three demons trapped in the vast mass of vegetation accumulated at the bottom of the reservoir beneath the third dam. Largely immobile, they died as he smashed their ribs into kindling using his shovel. The gaps in the structure their dissipating bodies produced simply offered another path to let the water rush in and destroy.

That battle demanded a second pill. He took a third at noon, the sun high in the sky even as clouds hid it and rain poured down soaking everything, at the halfway point to the fourth dam. That was the point at which he reached the out edges of the true demon horde.

From that point forward, every step required concentrated effort. He had to sense out sources of demonic qi, identify sight lines, chart paths between zones of exposure, and ensure neither sound nor splash betrayed him to the keen hearing of red ears. The next fifty kilometers took as much effort and focus as the previous three hundred.

Liao killed a dozen more ghouls. He stabbed them from behind in the swamps, lunging out from deep below in the soaking black waters. He evaded ten times that number, warping his path around the laggard elements of the horde that provided the red mass with a natural screen of sentries.

The fourth dam, a hulking structure that stretched nearly six hundred meters in length that rose nearly five meters above the river surface at several points, had over a dozen demons walking across its span. They were using the structure as a convenient path to the southeast.

To avoid those watchers, he made a grand swan dive out from the treeline, soaring high up into a splash free dive that placed him just beyond the inside edge of the superstructure. The red eyes, all facing toward the distant gateway of Mother's Gift to the southeast, never noticed him.

When he smashed through the wooden wall and collapsed it atop them, those demons became the first casualties of the flood attack.

The fourth pill went into his mouth as he moved into the final stretch of the destruction race. Liao felt his dantian trembling with this exertion, and his focus had begun to waver even as the worst was yet to come. He was within the horde now, surrounded by an army of demons and forced to charge without stopping. Everything Sayaana had taught him about stealth was no to be put to its greatest test.

He ran. Red eyes hunted for his motion. The starlight offered him the path, a stutter step between the lines, between glimpse and blink, enough to remain one step ahead of detection for a time.

But it was not enough on its own. There were too many eyes. Slipping between the trees, scrambling over shrubs, dashing through reeds, such measures carried him only so far. As the number of eyes increased exponentially, the gaps closed, coverage rose toward universal. All hiding places failed as the plague saw everything everywhere. His streaking form eventually caught the edge of a ghoul's observation and triggered screaming alarms and a wild chase.

Liao dared not attempt to endure such a rush. He could only break it apart. He would dive into deep water, into sinkholes, or run and crouched behind cliffs in order to confuse the demons. He slapped geese and ducks with his shovel, filling the skies with panicked birds to blind the foe in a storm of feathers and squawks. Each time he lost the horde as swiftly as he could, knowing that any prolonged alert could arouse the demonic cultivators nearby and the doom they would unleash.

As the horde thickened further, he took to crawling and swimming through streams. Any demons that stood too close were cut down from behind by a figure coated in thick mud. It got worse, and Liao had to retrieve his bow from his storage ring to shoot open a corridor he desperately raced through before the horde could recover.

After that, he abandoned the ground entirely, running across the branches, jumping from tree to tree and hoping the demons would hear his passage as that of a bird and avoid looking up. He cushioned his footfalls to offer up no more sound than a crow, and the foes rarely turned to the sky.

Combined with the use of ponds, he was able to stay ahead of spotters, barely, but arboreal motion slowed his progress and drained his reserves at shocking speed. As he moved toward the final dam, crawling on elbows and knees through a vast expanse of reeds on the edge of the reservoir, he took the fifth and sixth pills. The world swam in his vision, and his breath came raggedly. A single final effort was all that remained.

Nearly two thousand demons surrounded the massive seven-hundred-meter-wide structure of the final great dam. Liao could not approach above the surface but swam out from the reeds bobbing in the water like a beaver. He had to dive and surface again and again, twelve different times, as he fought and killed underwater.

Shovel against claws, he thrashed and smashed in the black, taking wounds from demon nails and wooden splinters alike. His lungs burned with each dive and feeling faded from his hands as his qi reserves dribbled out. Maddened strikes by dying ghouls left him bleeding and raw. It took everything he had to break the final posts. He could no longer feel the shovel at the end, and as the final gouge opened and the water rushed in, he let the flood carry the weapon away alongside the torrent.

It took the last of his strength to swim free of the suction and crawl out to the edge of the rapidly draining reservoir.

Unable to stand properly, Liao knew he would not run to the hills to the east. Instead, he scrambled north, found the nearest hill of any size, and then climbed atop a boulder near the top, the legacy of a long-ago flood he hoped had been fiercer than what was to come.

He waited then, gripping desperately and with the final pill held between his teeth, until the waters rose and swirled about him. As the rush slammed down and passed over, Liao took the final pill, slammed hands and feet into crevices, and clenched down with all the strength the last of his qi could provide.

The water struck and pulled. The great stone shifted and cracked. Sounds alien to the ear threatened to bury all sensation within the roil.

Then it stopped. The boulder remained. His body, bruised all over, rolled off the top and collapsed in the mud at the base, wrapped in the shadows there.

Liao felt no triumph, only exhaustion. He could not know what had happened, what would happen as the flood raced through its course.

Victory or obliteration, it now lay in the waters and the Celestial Mother's hands.