Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao felt the presence as it came from the west, a spike of power streaking across the sky at great speed. He recognized the unmistakable horror and potency of a demonic cultivator instantly, and dove into the thick undergrowth without hesitation. His heart pounded in his chest and blood rushed about his skull as his body was wracked by tension at this point, the moment of greatest vulnerability.

Invisible to the plague though he might be, Liao knew that this immunity had no impact on ordinary vision. If any demonic cultivator, with the eagle-eyed gaze of an immortal, happened to spot a human silhouette amid the trees, that was the end. There would be no evading such pursuit, and a single blow was all it would take to finish it.

Thankfully the fast-moving streak of qi high in the sky offered up neither deviations nor turns. He had not been spotted.

Liao breathed out a sigh of relief. This might be the expected outcome, one endured many times, but it did not make such moments any easier. Between the forest canopy, the camouflage patterns laid upon his garments, and the difficulty even immortal eyes faced when trying to resolve distant objects while moving at high speeds, the chances his presence would be detected were very low, but this offered little comfort. The critical window of time in which a demonic cultivator could potentially spot him before he detected their qi and took cover would eventually see him found. Only by growing strong enough that no gap persisted any longer could he truly be safe, but that was centuries hence at least.

While Liao crouched amid the brush and bamboo, the demonic cultivator moved further east. He followed the course of the great river, more or less, and eventually came to a sharp halt some distance east beyond the gateway to Mother's Gift. This placed Snow Feast perhaps one dozen kilometers southeast of Liao's present position, where he was releasing one of his very last cadres of beavers.

Carefully, he crept out through the undergrowth to the edge of a clearing and climbed a thick oak to stare out between the leafy boughs toward the now distant point of qi. Locating it was a trivial matter, given how much more power it concentrated compared to everything else in the basin. The presence exuded a combination of the crimson wretchedness of the plague and an overwhelming sense of cold and wet.

Visual observation confirmed the intuitive qi-based impulses. The demonic cultivator had stopped moving, but he had not come to ground. Instead, he hovered high in the air within a blue-white-black cloud. Every part of Liao's seasoned traveler's instincts screamed 'blizzard' when looking upon that swirling mass.

Cruel as that assault on the natural weather presented – it was only late summer; snow was not due for many months – it offered Liao a measure of confidence. Though the demonic cultivator could surely see through his self-generated veil of ice crystals, the cloud must have some impact on his ability to resolve details at a distance. In this way, his confidence in his ability to keep watch undetected increased markedly.

"Snow Feast has come down from his mountains," Sayaana supplied the inevitable conclusion from inside his skull. "The horde is obvious now."

Liao nodded in agreement. It had taken years, but what began as a supposition drawn from equations had gradually expanded into an increased presence of demons throughout the basin and finally into a slowly assembling vermillion army whose convergence on the gateway simple observation rendered clear. Trapper and immortal alike both agreed upon the likely timing of the attack to come.

It seemed Snow Feast could be added to that list.

For the remainder of the afternoon the demonic cultivator rode his portable blizzard – clearly a critical component of his movement technique – all about the basin in the sort of wide-ranging spatial assessment Liao had watched Artemay undergo during her mapping exercises. These motions, observed with great care from behind swiftly fashioned portable blinds of grass and vines, indicated an ever-increasing level of dissatisfaction as the demonic cultivator swirled about in growing speed and fury.

Snow Feast prowled the sky like a leaping leopard, furious and confined. Erratic dashes back and forth made it apparent, even with nothing more than a dark and whirling halo of ice to look upon, that the demonic cultivator was furious.

"He thinks the horde is too small," Sayaana giggled inside Liao's skull.

Silently, for he had not dared to speak since the demonic cultivator arrived, Liao nodded in agreement. He could feel their accord on this matter through the joined flow of qi. It was a broadly supported conclusion. Using sampling methods devised by Zhou Hua, which happily involved murdering demons closest to certain fixed points on the map, Liao had estimated the overall strength of the horde. It lacked even one third of the numbers that the Fuming Shade had brought forth one hundred and fifty years earlier.

Too few by far. The formation-based defenses of the Killing Fields, strengthened as they had been, could slaughter that many demons without a single cultivator of the sect needing to raise their weapon. As for Snow Feast, he was strong, but not nearly strong enough. Liao guessed he was in the fifth layer, for his power stood between that of Black Howl and the Fuming Shade, which he'd been told represented the fourth and sixth respectively. Akiray, all on her own, could pierce him swiftly with her spear.

Snow Feast must know that the Fuming Shade, and many others, had perished somewhere in the vast land between the mountains and the sea. According to the grand elders, the demonic cultivator of ice and snow had held command of the high peaks to the west since the demon war and never relinquished that dominion. Though he had never before attempted to attack Mother's Gift, or any of the other hidden lands that had once existed in the former orthodox heartland, Itinay had aired suspicion that he must recognize the danger of such a move.

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Every grand elder agreed he would not dare to attack alone.

The critical question that remained was simple: who would he bring with him?

"He's too close to the gateway to return right now," Sayaana noted. "I suppose we must wait until he either moves away, or until his allies arrive."

Agreeing to this, Liao cut open the bags he carried and allowed his remaining beavers to run toward water as their instincts demanded. It was not the ideal location for this drop, but an extra dam or two on this little tributary would make no difference in the end. He knew that he would not be releasing any more. Snow Feast's arrival served as a clear signal. The plan must advance to its final stage.

It was time to unleash death, and then the flood that followed, but in order to begin that process, he needed to return to the sect.

Thankfully, Snow Feast did not delay that objective overmuch. The demonic cultivator spent four days flying around the basin. His path was immensely simple to track, even without following his foul qi, for snow fell everywhere his cloud passed. These light coatings did little harm, though some insects and flowers perished beneath the sudden frost. The true nature of the demonic cultivator's dao did not make itself known until he landed. It was, as expected, monstrous.

It was also, as Sayaana noted, speaking with the voice of one who had encountered many of these traitorous wretches, remarkably literal. Such things were typical of those who had leaped to immortality using borrowed power. Their daos were simplistic, ill-formed things colored by the malice of their true master.

In the course of four days, Snow Feast touched the ground nine times, always on a mountaintop or ridge. He appeared to possess a distinct bias towards extreme elevations. Each time he landed, his black blizzard coated his surroundings, for nearly one hundred meters in all directions, in a thick blanket of snow sufficient to reach nearly to the top of Liao's boots.

This was no natural snowfall. Infused with the essence of the plaque and its master's gluttonous, brutal dao, it was consumptive.

The snow ate everything it touched. Animals, plants, mosses, fungi, the soil itself. Even lichens were consumed by the blue-white leaching. Passing through such a death zone, Liao discovered that the land had been reduced to bare rock and loose sand. Nothing else remained. The environment resembled nothing he'd seen so much as a tapestry woven by Itinay that depicted the surface of the moon.

The demonic cultivator bit into the world and sucked a piece of it dry with every step.

"Why?" he asked Sayaana, seeking some means to interpret this abomination. "He can't possibly absorb qi this way. Even the plague doesn't devastate like this."

"Yes," the remnant soul hissed. Anger flooded their joined qi reservoirs. "The snow costs more qi to make than it could ever possibly reclaim. This is slaughter for symbolism, a beast marking its territory by scraping claws over rocks. Sickening. Is he a man or a dog?"

Wanton killing to no purpose removed any doubt in Liao's mind as to the malevolence of the demonic cultivator. Stories spoke of such things, but it was his first time witnessing such a brutal and unhindered dao.

Rust Reaper had been a soldier. Whatever dark desires he'd possessed had been buried deep down beneath the orders he'd been given. Cutting apart a mountain to build walls might have been crude and wasteful, but the utility behind such an effort was obvious.

As to the trio who'd attacked Mother's Gift, he had only felt their presence from a distance. Witnessing what Snow Feast had done, he suspected each one contained their own abominable impulses. He felt he would not mind never learning any such further dark truths.

When the four days were finished, Snow Feast departed at high speeds. The demonic cultivator moved with such swiftness that most of his concealing cloud blew away and his true form was revealed atop a swirling whirlwind of ice crystals beneath the rising sun. By chance, he passed almost directly above Liao's position as the trapper lay half-buried inside of a newly completed beaver dam. Though it was only for a flickering fraction of a second, the baleful immortal passed overhead barely two hundred meters high. To a disciple in the thought weaving realm that was more than close enough to get a good look.

It made Liao nauseous simply to see and witness the true form of Snow Feast.

For over one hundred and fifty years of life, he'd encountered immortals primarily as beautiful women infused with stellar radiance, a brilliant and sometimes alien but always pure and elegant expression of power. Those demonic cultivators he'd observed had been corrupted and monstrous when compared to that vision, but still more or less complete and human. Rust Reaper had been a man cast in blood and rust. Scoria Scorn, whose image he'd encountered in paintings and tapestries produced by those who had seen her at intimate distance, appeared as a masked woman made of iron. Even the Fuming Shade, a horrific entity composed of ash and dust, conveyed a certain level of supreme mastery and absolute command that supplied temperance and reason to his destructive ashes.

Snow Feast shattered the lie of the elegance of immortality. Brutish violence and savage destruction were manifest in him, and in that way granted their place in the infinite dao.

The demonic cultivator stood at least two and a half meters stall, but he did not appear towering for he had the overwhelmingly broad and expansive build of an ogre. Huge limbs obscured his height inside a cloak of general massiveness further augmented by immense, thick plates of iron armor wrapped about arms, legs, waist, and chest. Simple designs, raised and crossed bars, marked these defenses, and they were laid atop many-layered hardened leather coats beaten and boiled to hold it in place. Simplistic work, but powerful, a proper match to the strength of the hulking frame.

A body that had four-fingered claws each the size of Liao's whole head in the place of proper digits and a fanged circular maw, like an eel crossed with a lamprey, surrounded by a wild beard of white hair caked thickly with dried blood. The demonic cultivator carried no weapons, but ice coated his armor and cloaked his oversized toes, its crystalline edges clearly capable of supplying as many transparent blades as he might require in any battle. Hunger pulsed from this thing that never needed to eat in palpable waves.

Not a human, for all that it might reason as one still. Snow Feast was a monster drawn from children's tales to haunt the world in flesh. Liao, trembling in his hidey hole, had never wished for strength so much at any point in his life as he did upon seeing that beast. He wanted nothing more than to trap it, crush it, and rid the world of it.

Not now, he knew, but someday. He would make Itinay's mission, the elimination of these monsters, his own. The world demanded it.