Unseen Cultivator

It was common, upon achieving a breakthrough to a new realm, for a cultivator of the Celestial Origin Sect to receive well-wishers and to host a social gathering for friends and associates. Qing Liao, upon reaching the thought weaving realm, did not choose to do this. The reason was simple; there was no one he wanted to see.

Elder Su Yi, the only member of the sect he considered a genuine friend, was in closed door cultivation as she followed her drive to attempt steady advancement through the spirit tempering realm. Elder Yan Yu, once his closest ally in the Textiles Pavilion and long his guide on the path of leatherworking, had passed away four years earlier, unable to overcome a bottleneck that halted his advancement through the same realm Su Yi now challenged.

His other associations were all with distant superiors. Elder Fu Jin, now in the soul forging realm, sent him a congratulatory message, as did Grand Elders Artemay, Itinay, and Neay, but the very idea of inviting any of those terrible masters to his home was horrifying. He was quite satisfied with the letters and happy that they chose to forego in-person visits.

Intellectually, he recognized that the attention he garnered from on high was a blessing, but he would prefer to keep such distance as he could sustain.

Though he was isolated, it was not as if he was a pariah. Newly minted as a disciple, with a yellow belt to replace the orange, he received congratulatory acknowledgments when walking about that sect. Within the bounds of textiles pavilion he worked regularly alongside others, and his advice was even sought with some regularity, for there were few with his specialization in the use of leather articles.

No one was unkind, but at the same time all remained distant and couched every encounter beneath the protective obscuration of formality. Even the youngest initiates, who were ignorant of the role he had played during the previous horde and did not understand why the leatherworking disciple stood apart, recognized that he did and acted accordingly.

The divide was entirely unspoken, an expression of the subtle will of the Grand Elders given life and shape. Never ordered, it was nevertheless always acknowledged. Such was the nature of life in a sect.

Liao chose to celebrate by visiting his mother instead. He also, as a matter of personal indulgence, dispatched a large order to Starwall City's best pastry chef – a man who cooked almost exclusively for cultivators – and stocked the shelves of his courtyard to bursting. The expense of such treats, which might once have been ruinous, no longer mattered. Not only did the rise in rank significantly increase his stipend, but the income he received as the sect's premier producer of decorative leather articles – a modest empire fashioned in boots and gloves – had become far more than he'd ever dreamed of earning.

He could, if he wished, have hired hunters to increase his supply and mortal assistants to help with the basic curing and tanning. Many disciples who found themselves serving a significant demand did so, but Liao had rejected the very idea of dedicating himself to business almost instantly. Pastries were an indulgence, but he had little else to spend money on, not when Sayaana demanded he make everything save his weapons himself. Besides, he intended to move beyond Mother's Gift, not devote his effort to mastering its markets.

Instead, he embraced his place apart. It allowed him to pursue his chosen path with additional vigor, spared the time-consuming interplay of sect life and wall patrol. Moving swiftly, he sent a letter to Grand Elder Neay two months following his breakthrough containing his request to join the sect's scout division.

The immortal kept the promise she'd made to him before his father's grave. The council gave their approval for this move, contingent upon Liao completing a specialized training regimen.

The Clandestine Order of Vigilant Observers, as the group of cultivators who fulfilled their duty to the sect by scouting out the Ruined Wastes was officially known, consisted of roughly thirty individuals. Mostly disciples of the thought weaving and awareness integration realms, they were primarily drawn from the formation and ritual pavilions and served under the command of the curmudgeonly and irritable Elder Ming Hui. A powerful and aged cultivator in the soul forging realm, he'd held the post for just over three centuries.

A fit and trim man seemingly of late middle age, he was clean-shaven and hard-eyed. Though he was not well-liked by his subordinates, the grand elders supported him. He kept the scouts alive at a rate vastly superior to his predecessor. For that achievement, and that alone, he was considered a pillar of the sect's overall security.

Ming Hui wanted absolutely nothing to do with Qing Liao, something made abundantly clear through the course of a single brief interview. "We have a system here, a method, but these things do not apply to you," he'd said the words coldly, heavily laden with his disregard. "Your activities beyond the gateway will never be served by an adoption of our training methods. The grand elders can decide what to do with you, but I will not permit you to join with those serving this order."

Off-putting though this was, especially when joined to the considerable pressure an elder in the soul forging realm could output, Liao appreciated the frankness of the declaration. He recognized, equally, that it was fundamentally true. The scouts worked in pairs. They moved in swift, burst-based excursions into the Ruined Wates, concealed beneath layered formations and rituals designed to hide them from the plague and conventional observation alike.

None of their tools, from pills to clothing, were of any use to him. Immune to the touch of the plague, Liao could walk naked around the world and never be noticed by any demons. At the same time, items with imbued qi stores of their own could be detected and give away his presence. The specialized equipment the scouts had spent centuries developing and mastering would only hinder his efforts.

Given that reality, he made no attempt to contest Elder Ming Hui's decision. Though he might have drawn upon the support of the Grand Elder to muscle his way forward and claim a position among the scouts, that would achieve nothing in the end. Besides, the prospect of such an openly antagonist action felt ill upon his tongue and skin.

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Instead, he took the list of benchmarks to be met and tests to be passed used by the scouts – Elder Ming Hui was willing to provide that list, seemingly believing Liao would never pass them – and allowed Sayaana to devise a training regimen suitable to reaching the goal. He wrote a missive to Neay explaining this course and received formal approval in return.

Sayaana suggested the whole sequence was yet another test, a way to see how he would react to the sect pushing against him. Liao found that disheartening but could not disagree. He tried not to reflect on it overmuch.

Thankfully, Sayaana left him little time for such inward-looking thoughts. The remnant soul, sharing his body and qi as she did, knew his limitations better than anyone, and her understanding of the dangers of the wild was unmatched. The regimen she crafted was utterly merciless as a result.

Countless hours of practice in the farm fields to induce mastery of bow, dagger, and movement techniques were the core of it, working his body to the limits of its superhuman capacity. Beyond this, she negotiated isolated patrols on the Starwall, allowing Liao to stalk back and forth looking for the rare demon that infiltrated alone that he might hunt one down and kill it unnoticed. Four months pacing back and forth atop the masonry netted only a single ghoul, but Liao duly stalked it and blew apart its head using a single enlarged arrow from nearly a kilometer distant.

The ghoul never ever noticed the threat until it was dead. It was almost pitifully easy to kill. He'd had countless hunts that had proved much more difficult.

Despite this progress, Sayaana pushed him to train relentlessly for two whole years. The stumbling block, as ever, was movement, the Stellar Flash Steps. Grand Elder Neay demanded he reach a movement speed nearly equal to the record achieved by any cultivator in the thought weaving realm. That, she claimed, would allow him to outrun even several enraged demons.

To Liao, who had long struggled with the light-based method, it represented an extremely difficult wall to overcome. His initial difficulties with the erratic, stutter-step process had never entirely left him. He almost despaired of ever hitting the mark without increasing his cultivation further.

Sayaana did not accept such excuses.

The remnant soul determined that Liao would match the pace demanded, or his feet would fall off. She considered the training, the endless days spent in sprints, dashes, and distance runs, to be a beneficial end in and of itself. "If you are spotted in the wild, you will have to run and run. Demons don't get tired. Demons don't get bored. You must outdistance them. So run."

Liao ran. They plotted out a course along the Starwall ramparts, from Itinay's tower, past Aekay's and turning about at Artemay's. He ran sprints between them all, until he could no longer stand. For each sprint where he failed to improve his time, Sayaana demanded two more in punishment.

Many nights spent collapsed atop cold masonry followed. Servants delivered needed food, water, and endless pairs of new shoes. Cultivators assigned to patrol the northern portion of the wall grew to recognize and ignore his presence. No one made the least comment regarding this. Eccentric training methods were common, obsessive running was barely noticeable. Many in the sect chose to practice the Stellar Flash Steps by running across lakes or rivers. Elders, capable of flight, mastered that motion by dancing between mountaintops.

Eventually, after adding new calluses to his toes and greatly strengthening his knees, Liao finally managed to achieve the required time.

Satisfaction was short-lived. Sayaana made him repeat the process until he could match the mark ten times in a row. That took another two months.

This, brutal and exhausting though it was, served merely as the preliminary effort. "Speed and strength are nothing without stealth," the green northern woman declared. "Demons cannot sense your qi, but neither can ordinary mortals. They have the same eyes, mostly. So, they'll test you. Make a circuit of Mother's Gift, all of it, without being seen by anyone."

That task, which alternated between trivially easy and impossibly difficult depending on where he was standing, was one Liao embraced openly. The logic of Sayaana's teaching was inescapable.

In the wilderness, it was easy. Humans were rare, their signs readily discerned, and their vision quickly evaded. This encompassed much of the circuit, for mortals avoided the bounded edge of the little world, but no hidden land could be constrained entirely by the wild along its whole edge. There were places where field brushed that boundary, tended by servant families who'd learned to ignore the distortion hanging in the air.

Many eyes, concentrated in one space, demanded a different response than that used to avoid the sight of a single sharp-eyed forester.

Every time he failed, and Sayaana's ability to access his own sensory field with greater acuity than he himself possessed meant she missed nothing – his recent breakthrough offered the first hint at the true capabilities one with an immortal mind could discern – he had to run back to the Starwall and begin again.

Liao learned to travel at night and under cloud cover. He moved fast when all the light above was gone and remained hidden when the sun rose high and clear. He learned to love the rain and to exult in mist and fog. He walked within rushing rivers to obscure the sound of his steps and hide his scent. He covered his face and hands in mud to mask the light color of his skin against the dark backdrop of trees and reeds.

Arrows were used to strike down birds or squirrels that might betray his presence, but Sayaana's instruction took this approach even further. She taught him how to shape the qi his body naturally exuded, changing it subtly so that it aligned with his surroundings. In this way he disguised himself as a creature of the forest, deceiving animal minds. It was a useless approach against cultivators, who would innately recognize the quantity and conscious nature of his qi no matter how it was masked, but he became a silent ghost as far as the creatures of the land were concerned.

Attempting the same method within Starwall City, he discovered that not only rats and pigeons, but pigs, dogs, and cats could be fooled in this manner.

The seasons turned and the difficulties changed. Summer offered a thick cloak of protective vegetation but also filled the hills and forests with prying eyes. Winter removed those observers but robbed him of covering. Snow, though useful to shroud footfalls and limit vision, was accompanied by ice whose cracking sound alerted all to the passage of a heavy traveler. No single circuit was, or could be, truly the same.

Existence within the hyperaware state of constant vigilance Sayaana's challenge demanded was initially exhausting. For a time, this compromised Liao's ability to handle the circuits. The remnant soul taught him to find moments of peace, points of security where stress could be banished and meditation resumed. The full nature of his ordinary routine: meditation, weapon practice, and even trapping and harvesting, all these things were slowly added to her requirements. In time, the challenge transformed from a simple circuit to a way of living, of being, an existence surrounded by one million one hundred thousand souls that remained unknown to any of them.

Isolating, but he found that he did not grow lonely. He was, after all, never alone. Sayaana was always there, and while sometimes she served as the harsh taskmaster, at other time she was simply the green woman who walked through the wild beside him. Her presence kept him sane and validated Itinay's essential determination to bind the remnant soul to his destiny. The road ahead would have been impossibly daunting, otherwise.

When he finally returned to the Starwall, unseen all the way around the basin encompassing Mother's Gift, he found Grand Elder Itinay waiting for him. "You're ready," the icy immortal declared. "Time to take the next step forward."