Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao spent seven months working twelve hours every day to repair and strengthen the Starwall. Eder Kuai Zhang, as stern a taskmaster as the sect possessed, was a bearded and muscular man who appeared to be solidly in middle age who accepted neither argument nor talking while at work. He commanded the work detail with a granite fist.

Upon learning of Liao's background as a tanner, the elder took advantage by assigning him to mix the specialized mortar that served to bind the stones together and transmitted the power of the Starwall's foundational formations throughout its massive structure. In this way, the elder revealed his mastery of the power of punishment. Hauling, measuring, mixing, and churning the great barrels of mortar represented a torment of tedium that acted as a millstone against Liao's mental acuity.

"Find ways to hold yourself together in the face of this need," the elder instructed. "Acquire serenity in action, any action, in order to see beyond the moment and banish all distraction. Master this and barriers to the dao dissolve and cultivation improves." This approach seemed to work for the elder, who stood solidly in the soul forging realm, but as he was the only true mason in the entire sect, few shared his enthusiasm.

Liao did his best to absorb those words anyway. Artemay had ordered him to contemplate the joining of two paths, explorer and slayer. Such an effort required mental clarity resistant to the slap and slurp of mortar mixing.

He made progress, but seven months did not suffice to overcome that challenge. He did not think seven years would have. Others, assigned to different tasks – the punishment detail contained a mixture of initiates and disciples – suffered with equal silent misery. Everyone hated what they had been tasked to accomplish, shoved straight into the depths of some specific personal weakness the elder seemed to be able to identify with unerring accuracy. Many begged Kuai Zhang for reassignment. None succeeded in bending his judgment a hair.

The seven months were the longest of Liao's life, and also the shortest. During the night and early mornings, he mixed mortar and filled sacks. He spent his days by his mother's bedside, tending to her and telling her stories of his journeys. When she napped, which was often, he cultivated. When she grew irritable and demanded privacy he helped clean the house and prepare meals. Time in the wilderness had made a capable cook out of him, but Chen Chao absolutely refused to let him near pot or stove, claiming this was a reversal not to be tolerated. A cultivator could never be made to cook for mortals.

Day by day the shared hours shortened. Medicine allowed his mother to maintain lucidity and dulled her pain, but it could not stop the illness from tearing her body apart. The energy she possessed to meet each day grew less and less. She woke later, napped more, and lay down to sleep ever earlier as the weeks and months passed. In time, matters proceeded to the point that she would do little more than eat, wash, and take her medicines. Even talking seemed to leave her rapidly exhausted.

Liao, his mother, and Chen Chao all knew what was happening, but no one said anything explicitly. Goodbyes had passed before he even went south to the sea.

Eventually, at sunset one day in winter, his mother simply fell asleep and failed to awaken the next day. When Chen Chao greeted him upon his return from the night's wall maintenance, he found she held a missive stating that his punishment had come to an end. His mother continued to breathe and occasionally murmur in her sleep for three more days. He cultivated beside her the whole time, stopping only when everything finally ceased.

With Chen Chao's help, Liao conducted the necessary preparations and then carried the remains back home to Echuantun. The funeral ceremony conducted there was simple and short. Having lived to be eighty-seven, Liao's mother had survived well beyond most of her peers and even some of their children. Those who came to mourn were mostly from Liao's generation, individuals he vaguely recalled from his childhood, now themselves grown bent and old. A visit to the village cemetery revealed that, of those who stood in line with him to be tested on that fateful solstice, more than two-thirds had already passed.

He cried as he placed the seed in the ground above his mother's ashes, setting it to grow alongside three strong trees. It would be, Liao thought in a moment of strange reflection, likely the last time he did this. Chen Chao's grave would be tended by her own family, with the seed placed either by her younger brother or one of many nieces and nephews.

Cultivators, of course, were not buried in this manner. Their names were added to the memorial monuments of their respective pavilions and their ashes were mixed into the mortar used to sustain the Starwall. Liao had come to know that process intimately, and to dread that fate.

A cultivator might bury mortal children, should they have any, but Liao had decided that potential path was not one he would walk. Having gained absolute control over his fertility while in the vitality annealing realm, this was a firm commitment. The life given to him to bring forth anew belonged to the soul trapped in a jewel upon his brow. That duty could not be passed over to another. His family, he believed, would understand this need.

Sayaana stood beside him as he mourned. Liao felt her hands upon his shoulders even though she could not truly touch the world. It was comforting, that companionship. "A link to the mortal world, severed," the remnant soul whispered as the dirt closed over the pine seed. "There will be new connections, and new losses to come, but they will be passed among cultivators. Be glad you had the chance to hold this fast while it lasted," she added, unexpectedly. "I didn't. You owe Su Yi. Try to think of a proper gift before she emerges from whatever tower she's huddling within."

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"You never contacted your parents after joining the Endless Needles Sect?" Liao, still raw from the day's ceremonies, dared to probe into the northern woman's past. Normally, he forbore all such inquiries.

"Dad died when I was ten," Sayaana answered without grief or rancor. "He fell from a tree while working to gather honey, cracked his head open on the way down. We lived with my uncle after that." The green-tinted face turned to a scowl, bark-like ridges on the cheeks raised prominently and suddenly sharp. "He took my mother to bed at the same time as my aunt, the foul beast; called it the price for a place in his hut. If I hadn't become a cultivator, he would have sold me as a bride to one of his friends."

She fell silent then, and her projection froze in place. "Our sect leader, his name was Spine Storm. He was a hard man and forbade contact with the rest of the land. Our sect had one hundred members. That was our family. He was our father and his wife – he went through several – was our mother. I was a lonely child few talked to. It suited me, but I obeyed the sect's rules. Soon enough, I forgot that mortals shared our forests. Our master treated them like the reindeer, as a source of resources to be managed."

Turning, she looked from Liao to the grove, and then to the sky. "The Endless Needles Land was cold, and the winter is never kind. We endured. This place is a gift. You thrive. Both offer paths to the dao, as must be, but I am not suited to this one. Had we been closer to the mortals in my homeland, we would only have hurt them. I think Spine Storm knew that. He was a harsh man, and bitter, but not cruel, at least, not intentionally. He saw the divide as better, peaceful."

Her hand, with its green nails, moved along his arm. "I'm a little jealous of this place, weak though it can be."

Somehow, Liao knew that he dared not ask for more detail. Instead, he followed a different thread presented by those words. "I wonder what the old world was like, compared to this, or compared to the Endless Needles Land."

"Bits and pieces. Fragments. Little scattered portions of the lost world, that is all that remains," Sayaana shook her head, braided hair scattering. "I never saw it, only the shattered remains, but you've seen it too. Ruins flock to good soil. Humans can live without farming, but most farm. The old world, it would be more like this farmer's pen than otherwise, though harsher."

She sighed then, a drawn-out sound, pine boughs rustling in the wind. "I recall a few stories of Orday, told to me before coming here. They say she was kind, and no cruel master is called mother by her disciples after being gone for so long. That kindness is still here. Other places, well," the form of her face twisted horribly, shifting from sadness to contempt in a single frowning bend. "Iay told me, once, shortly after I lost my flesh, that long ago, before the war, Bloody Roam was considered a revered hero by half the world."

Liao blanched. He had felt the qi of demonic cultivators. The thought that anyone who could choose to twist and warp their nature in such a manner might be held up as an icon horrified him. Perhaps it was a good thing that much of the old world had been lost, fragmented across the vastness of empty millennia.

Silently, he wondered what that might mean if victory was achieved. Explorer and slayer, two paths as outlined by Artemay, but only one goal. A world free of plague, one not bounded by crimson walls.

The work mixing mortar taught him at least one insight. He was still in a trap, and so was everyone else. He could reach his arm out further than others, but that was all. Freedom required the elimination of not just the demonic cultivators, but also the plague itself.

Killing the traitors was a simple objective to grasp. Removing the plague, which rested in the air, the earth, the water, and even inside living bodies, that was something he could not imagine. He could barely imagine the bottom of the ocean, but the giant had walked across it. There was, he knew, a plan in place. Grand Elder Itinay had countless plans, and likely an entire shelf devoted to the plague's obliteration. She would be prepared if the moon should fall from the sky.

What those plans might be though, he had no idea.

Sayaana, it appeared, had somewhat similar thoughts. "That little bird sculpture," it was impossible to forget the artifact. Its beauty remained seared into his eyes. "That was a legacy of the old world. An object chosen over ascension. Disgusting. We may fail to find the dao, perhaps endlessly, but to not even try," she shook her head again, and this time the braids were like whips. "Hopefully the sisters can do better than that."

"They don't get to decide alone," the words escaped Liao's lips before he'd even consciously conceived of them. He wanted to gasp, and then laugh, but stopped before his jaw could open. The blazing sun of a smile that radiated out from Sayaana's face banished all recriminations from his tongue. He had not meant her, not entirely, but he realized then that this was one of his own goals, and that it mattered.

The Twelve Sisters had turned Mother's Gift into a farm for cultivators, the greatest number of chances at ascension as possible. Artemay, no doubt, had sums and equations to support this. But all of the world could not be a farm, not even most of it. Perhaps, if he fulfilled the schemes others devised, the time might come to speak for the wilderness.

A half-formed thought, one that slumbered low in the mind for now, but one he gathered up and seeded there with care. He did not travel beyond the gateway to check off entries on Zhou Hua's list. He traveled to bring the world to the trapped.

A seed, offered to his mother's memory, was his limit for now. That would change. It would take time, but he had plenty. However many steps it took to find the dao, he would not tire of walking.

It was time to return to that path. "I think I should walk east to the sea next time."

Sayaana kept on smiling.