Unseen Cultivator

For cultivators, time moves differently than it does for ordinary humans. It is both faster and slower. Faster in that one who lives for centuries rarely feels the need to rush anything according to the timescales that matter to mortal communities. Slower in that a cultivator's day is much more prolonged and potentially much more productive than any mortal could possibly be.

Qing Liao, as a cultivator in the first layer of the thought weaving realm, could survive perfectly well on four hours of sleep each night. If he felt it necessary, he could stay awake for as many as fifteen straight days. Assuming a sufficient supply of food and water, he could labor at full strength for a similar length of time as well, never needing to pause for rest and never suffering an injury due to repetitive motion or muscle strain. Beyond this, he also simply worked faster than an ordinary human, the base pace of every action, large and small, was accelerated. Even such a simple thing as walking across a room took fewer steps. Progress was limited more by the capabilities of the materials and tools at hand rather than physical capability.

For many cultivators, such capacity was little utilized. Beyond the minimum exercise, patrols, and production levels that the sect mandated according to their realm, most lived fairly languid lives. They would meditate each day, but usually for no more than an hour or two. Time devoted to their crafts and weapons practice was often similarly limited. Most spent the balance of their hours engaged in social gatherings, playing games, and taking in other amusements.

The Celestial Origin Sect accepted this. The Twelve Sisters had, in the first few centuries of Mother's Gift's history, attempted to enforce brutally strict and diligent cultivation regimens. That had failed, spectacularly. Hundreds of cultivators were stymied by bottlenecks, shattered by crippling qi deviation, or lost to rushed tribulations.

The dao, they soon concluded, could not be forced. Nor was the slow and sluggish approach necessarily ineffective or even inefficient. Extraordinary effort was not a prerequisite to progress. Just as the dao was infinite, so were the means to reach it.

But, for those cultivators who did choose to devote their every waking hour to their labors, the sect offered every opportunity and support toward their embrace of that approach.

Qing Liao, racing against his mother's mortality, chose to walk the path of continuous involvement. This conviction was aided by a simple calculation: concentrating his efforts while within the sect allowed him to justify spending more time beyond its boundaries. He engaged an ever-increasing proportion of his total hours in equally expanding circuits, growing the length and distance with each expedition spent wandering the wilderness. It became a routine.

Each time he returned he piled the contents of his scavenged storage devices into heaping bags within the flat and sturdy confined of Rust Reaper's ruined mountaintop fortress – it was hoped that if anyone detected the minute amount of spatial qi the rings generated they would be swamped by the residue the demonic cultivator had left behind – and dragged them atop a bulging and awkward sack-covered sledge back through the gateway into Mother's Gift.

Once secure inside the Killing Fields, the spoils were divided. The pavilions were each granted those items specified on their request lists, mysteries were sent off to the sect librarians for analysis, and the small fraction of the items contained within his own and Zhou Hua's personal quotas were set aside for their private use and taken back to their workshops.

The necessary sorting and cataloging demanded by this process was greatly expedited by Zhou Hua's aid. She was ideally oriented towards such categorization, and her own tendency towards tireless effort greatly exceeded Liao's own.

Eight years passed in this way.

It felt as if it took both a lifetime and an eyeblink. The only measurable change, internally, was his increase of a single layer during the time. He had attained that modest achievement meditating on a mountaintop while millions of birds passed overhead in a great migration. The flock, mostly geese, was so thick it all but blotted out the sun.

Liao saw, and slew, a number of demons during this time. That included his first ogre. It was a highly anticlimactic encounter. He filled the monster with a dozen arrows from behind the cover of paired blinds hundreds of meters distant, leaving the demon scrambling back and forth between incoming blows it could not see until it collapsed. He took little pride in the accomplishment, but appreciated the greater excursion time it earned him.

The immortals were largely absent from his life during this period. Grand Elder Itinay had secured herself within closed door cultivation and did not emerge at all, speaking to no one for decades. Neay did not commit to that path with such single-minded determination, but she left her tower only at the peak of planting and harvest seasons and spoke only to members of her pavilion for a few days of the year at most. Qing Liao's case was left largely to Artemay to manage, which due to the predilections of the hooded immortal kept matters very distant. He received missives acknowledging his work supporting the alchemy pavilion, but little else.

This light hand of management offered him the freedom to spend most of his time focused on personal activities, a situation typical of most disciples.

Liao's primary goal during this interval was the production of a proper set of travel garments and gear. For weapons, he remained content with borrowing bows and daggers from the sect armory. That repository contained many implements suited to his current strength without any embedded qi of their own, and he'd found his hands turned poorly to the production of weapons. The rest, however, he resolved to make himself.

The designs were supplied, primarily, by Sayaana. This left him wearing outfits that hewed to the aesthetics of the far northern realms, not Mother's Gift, but he appreciated their practicality. The remnant soul offered a sturdy and thick scheme, with multiple layers, that remained highly mobile and not overly cumbersome. Making it required an acquired mastery of numerous skills in textile crafting, not merely leatherworking alone.

He began with trousers and a shirt; both made of linen. Of boring traditional cuts, brown to blend in, and comfortable against the skin, they fashioned the base. Above this he added a thigh-length tunic of soft deerskin fronted with silk, suitable to absorb arrow strikes. It would be typical to add a mail coat above this, but Liao chose instead to form the primary armored layer using bronze-coated pangolin scales instead. The result appeared silver-shaded but was flat and lacking in shiny polish and therefore less noticeable. Additional protection was provided by pauldrons, greaves, and vambraces formed of hardened cowhide leather, solid but still light and not overly restrictive.

Each of the exterior pieces was fringed in fur, mongoose on the greaves, marten on the vambraces, and civet on the pauldrons. He dyed everything uniformly, a soft, pale gray shade. Elephant hide, hardened and carefully shaped, provided an open-faced pot helmet.

He wore a thick belt to carry his daggers and essential tools and paired bandoliers to hold the many bracelets, rings, and necklaces he'd acquired from Yezi graves to serve as his baggage. He carried a thick quiver on his back, beside his bow in its case.

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Sayaana claimed the ensemble made him look like a proper forest walker.

Zhou Hua said he looked like a dashing barbarian.

For his part Liao was happy it was durable, comfortable, and moved easily through the thick forests of the wild south. He greatly appreciated the alchemical treatment Zhou Hua provided that proofed the boots completely against water's touch. The southern regions were quite wet, with a truly endless number of streams and puddles, and even cultivator agility did not suffice to keep boots dry.

The alchemist's company became a major feature of his life, something Liao had never expected and for a long time left him rather confused. During those years he spent less and less time visiting Su Yi, mostly because she was busy cultivating or working through the increased responsibilities that came with acquisition of elder status. They remained friends, but the combination of her transition to the spiritual state that accompanied the fifth realm and his own increased cultivation, changed the nature of their relationship in subtle but key ways. His childhood infatuation with the beautiful woman, now recognizable as such, had faded.

Of course, the presence of another woman in his life, this one a genuine peer, certainly influenced that act of self-reflection.

As she was the last person he would speak to prior to each departure, and the first to greet him upon every return Zhou Hua became a presence of inescapable importance in the patterns that defined his present life.

This induced a set of muddled feelings he struggled to sort through. She was pretty, of course. It was broadly impossible for a cultivator in the thought weaving realm, their body refined by the wash of qi from heart to hair, not to be. Further, she possessed a certain measure of intellectual, witty appeal that magnified the refined, carefully elevated nature of her personal presentation. It was as if she would never pay the least attention to those she felt unworthy, and she had clearly raised him above that status.

They worked together easily and well, with minimal friction. Liao could not match her knowledge and did not try. He had superior instincts and intuition and relied upon those instead. She seemed to enjoy his tales of the wild, making a sort of ever-changing puzzle out of them. She amassed lists of animals and plants and worked to map out changes in the course of rivers compared to old records. Landslides, earthquakes, and other motions of the land were added to the archives beneath her strict and sharp calligraphy.

Though she relied upon accuracy, she did not demand too much. Zhou Hua was content to let him listen while she spoke and did not pepper him with questions he would struggle to answer. If he found that he had nothing to say while he sorted through materials or repaired his gear, she would sit on her cushion and read one of the seemingly infinite number of books she sought to memorize in contented silence.

It was all very companionable, but Liao could not have said if it was romantic. He discovered, contemplating this, that he lacked any context for such practices. Since dispatching Chen Chao to care for his parents full time he had not taken another intimate companion. Lust could be slaked through occasional visits to the dancing girls in their halls, though he found little satisfaction there and such assignations became ever less frequent as time passed.

So, when, upon viewing his completed outfit for the first time, Zhou Hua said. "You look like a dashing barbarian." He found himself turning back to her with an impertinent but burning question on his tongue.

"Is that good?" Liao dared. "Are you interested in characters from old stories?"

The look of confusion that spread across the slender, slightly severe face mirrored one Liao had seen looking out from his wash basin many mornings. "I, uh, I, um," Zhou Hua sputtered briefly. She reached toward a book resting on her writing desk before pulling her hand back sharply. It was a strangely endearing set of motions, but this hesitation was not sustained.

Carefully, the alchemist breathed in and settled fully into meditative posture, tucking her legs beneath her small frame. Standing before her in her modest hall, Liao could feel as she centered herself. Her qi, a soft pool of power often trembling with barely concealed academic excitation, stilled. When she opened her eyes after this pause, they were dark and impenetrable, a match for the mirror smooth presentation she offered to qi senses.

"Cultivation truly does slow matters compared to mortal life," she noted without the least hint of irony. "We have stretched a question that might have been asked after eight weeks or even eight days out to eight years. Worse, nothing that happened during that time has made it easier to answer."

Silent still, Liao agreed. He often thought matters of the heart would have been easier, living as a mortal. His parents would have arranged for him to marry a suitable village girl, and he would have learned to make the best of the pairing along the way. Cultivators were free of all such obligations but were equally bereft of guidance. He sat down beside this pretty woman and wondered where things might develop, with no idea whether it would be wise or even what he truly desired.

"I am not much for romance," Zhou Hua spoke with soft deliberation. "We make excellent working partners, and I am not blind to the possibility of," she hesitated then, but only for a half-step. "Enjoyable intimacy. But that is all. I will not bind myself to anyone for centuries, of pursue some idyllic dream of dao companionship. If you want to make a proper partnership of this, to spend your nights with me while this moment lasts, then yes, I'm interested." She pushed a smile across her lips then, not coquettish or flirtatious, nothing holding hidden promises. She displayed nothing but genuine interest in seeing what might be.

It was a welcome reaction, and not more than he could manage. Liao felt his heart beat faster as he considered an answer. Honesty, and bound to an intrinsically temporary assignation, this proposal was small, within his capacity to embrace. Even as it offered ease, it infected him with doubt. Eight years might be a long time to stumble towards a courtship, but the working relationship could well stretch to a century or more.

Longer than Liao had yet lived. Not forever, but still a long time.

And yet, in the same frame, not long at all. He spent barely half his time inside the confines of Mother's Gift and expected that it would decrease further. His archery was improving. Another two layers, three at the most, and he'd seek out a chance to take down a giant. That achievement, should he manage it, would serve as an argument to range as far and wide as he wished, something he believed the sect deeply desired. The list held by the pretty woman before him included items from increasingly distant locations. Not just the ocean, but the far north, the vast deserts to the west, and even tropical islands.

A fourth of his time in the sect, maybe less. That was his expectation for the future.

And only some portion of that would be spent beside Zhou Hua. They were both busy, bound by their cultivation and their duties. Even now, he sat with her for only a modest portion of her waking hours. Adding an additional aspect to such contacts, he hoped, would not change things much.

Or at least not negatively.

It was enough. The offer was more than worth the risk. Desire overrode any other objections.

"I think," Liao chose his words carefully. "I would like to return to a couch, not just a cushion." He did his best to keep the hunger off his face as he said those words.

At that remark, Zhou Hua blushed in the most delightful manner.

It was a rare sight and made her normally cold countenance all the more appealing. "Perhaps you shall, next time." Now the smile turned distinctly enticing. She turned her head and body to emphasize the light curves of her slender form in imitation of a dancer. It was not a refined motion, one full of obvious inexperience. Somehow, that made the gesture far more appealing. "If you bring me something nice. Prove that you mean it." She reached out and tapped the folio containing her ever-expanding list of prizes. "And with something not found in here."

"I see." That would be, Liao knew, a challenge. Flowers or pretty stones would not serve. The finer things did not tempt this woman, only rare reagents and knowledge to stimulate the intellect. A Yezi artifact might be acceptable, perhaps, if he could find some suitable bit of bronze that had endured across the ages.

Not an easy task, but one he found a sudden inspiration to complete. That seemed a good sign. Testing his luck, Liao reached out and grasped the hand resting atop the thick mass of pages. Offering a light squeeze, he smiled back. "I'm sure the wide world contains many worthwhile treasures."

"We shall see. I am a harsh judge." Zhou Hua smirked, but she neither let go nor made any move to pull back her arm.

Her hand felt very warm. They did not move for some time.

During the remainder of the two weeks Liao remained in the sect, neither of the pair made any further mention of this arrangement. However, when he departed toward the southwest to hunt for frogs, fungi, and pheasants in the semi-tropical mountain forests, Zhou Hua kissed him on the cheek rather than saying goodbye.