Unseen Cultivator

The full power of the Celestial Origin Sect, once unleashed, was considerable. Fifteen hundred superhumans all turned towards the singular purpose of obliterating the demons at their doors could accomplish wonders. The beaver flood scheme pioneered by Qing Liao and endorsed by Grand Elder Itinay was merely one of many plans set into motion once it became clear that a horde would soon arrive. This plan required the majority of the attention of the husbandry pavilion, but that was the smallest of the twelve.

Even that was a formidable force, when committed. Within a week of adopting the plan, cultivators ranged across Mother's Gift, capturing and caging over half of the beavers the hidden land contained, several hundred in all. These were placed in specially constructed cages built expressly for this purpose. Careful application of the pavilion's techniques, relayed through the use of special foods and herbal infusions, served to induce breeding almost immediately. Four months later, the first newborn beavers were added to the enclosures, the first generation of a massive sequential increase intended to take a few hundred animals to ten thousand or more in under five years. Screeching and hissing imposed a constant cacophony on the compound produced specifically for this project.

In the interim, Liao spent his time scouting out the key sites that Zhou Hua had determined, using complex mathematics he did not understand, as the places where massive linchpin dams must be laid. Finding these river bends and constrictions on the ground, as opposed to on a map, was not a simple task. A great deal of careful orienteering was required to insure proper detection. Qi senses helped, but the project nevertheless demanded he acquire the skills of a surveyor.

He found this teaching a welcome one, for it offered a new way to read the land, one that differed from both the techniques he'd learned as a child and the intuitive forest-qi-based sensing Sayaana had imparted to him. Liao, in his travels, saw no reason not to utilize all possible methods.

To that point it all felt very preliminary. It was only after a year had passed that the first group of rodents were led through Su Yi's custom-fashioned formation and lulled into a deep slumber that it began to feel real. This initial group dispatched to the basin was small, a mere two dozen. It was a demonstration more than a true founding component of the grand project. Despite this, as Liao carefully packed the sleeping animals into special bags stacked with bedding and a founding food supply, everything suddenly transformed from the theoretical to the real.

Three days later, when he dropped the first four mated pairs out along a small tributary high in the mountains at the basin's northern border, it became desperately present. Liao took an axe to a cluster of trees there to ensure these pioneering engineers were well fed. He looked upon the first act of logging to grace those hills in twenty-seven centuries with deeply troubled feelings.

Awakened by the splash as trees collapsed into the water, the beavers eagerly rushed into the embrace of the liquid and made themselves at home. They appeared quite content, as Liao watched for several hours, happily taking to the new territory. His impression of the project's chances for success were further enhanced when, upon reaching his third release site, he discovered that a native beaver family had already moved in over the winter and begun building a sizable dam of their own exactly where the plan proscribed it. Few sights would have offered greater reassurance that the scheme could succeed.

In this way, a cycle took shape, one that ran from late spring to early autumn every year. Liao would spend his time rushing back and forth across the vast basin and surrounding mountains, the lands overlapped by Mother's Gift and somewhat beyond. He made journey after journey carrying dozens of furry combat engineers forth to wage the greatest water attack in the history of the world. Pond by pond, tributary by tributary, a legion of endlessly gnawing teeth cut through the forests, walled away the rivers, and filled their new reservoirs with the liquid artillery needed to obliterate a demon horde.

During the winters, the pattern changed. The beavers were left to slumber away peaceably in their lodges, and Liao worked on alone. He chopped trees and moved earth in immense quantities to lay down dams along the key tributaries. An even greater stock of timber was cut and sent downstream to clog the flow of the Great Eastern River and form the beginning of a weir before the great gorges. This would make further construction easier and strengthen the flood to come.

Liao used only natural materials and hid all mounded earth beneath great cloaking piles of branches and brush to ensure that his structures appeared beaver made. His critical point dams generally exceeded the width of even the largest constructions of the furry rodents, and vastly expanded upon their depth, but it would take a skilled observer with intense knowledge of these forests to recognize that. Snow Feast, flying over in the same irregular patterns as always, appeared singularly uninterested in the matter.

As the seasons turned and the beavers conducted their labor in ever-increasing multitudes, the lands of the basin and mountains changed. Thousands of dams, some small and some large, captured the tremendous flows of water sourced to both the great storms that came from the south and the meltwater that descended from the towering mountain range to the west. Liquid filled the basin, slowly but steadily, beyond the ability of the clogged rivers to carry away. Soils became utterly saturated. Forest converted to swamps, ponds into vast shallow lakes, and rivers burst free of their banks to chart vast many-braided courses across the newly created bottomlands. The vegetation shifted in response to this transformation. Upland trees perished as the waters drowned their roots. Strands of adventurous new growth, dominated by cattails, reeds, and rushes, coated the region.

These processes too, Liao influenced. In the sixth winter, with the forests losing the battle with the growing swamps, he released thousands of ducks and geese at Sayaana's suggestion. The waterfowl, hungry and cold, consumed huge quantities of water plants in their struggle to survive to spring. In this way thick and tangled growth capable of holding back the rush of the floodwaters to come was prohibited from taking root.

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Additional countermeasures followed. Liao slaughtered large numbers of wolves and foxes to preserve the beaver and moose populations. Along the course of the Great Eastern River itself, he logged whole hillsides and then dropped the massive quantities of exposed mud into the channel to induce siltation. Each such move made the river less capable of clearing the waters accumulating within the basin.

Step by step, the whole region was brought to the precipice of disaster.

Within Mother's Gift, a similar but less obvious transformation took place. Possessed of truly advanced warning and granted additional resources by Liao's extensive gathering over a century, the arts of death deployed across the Killing Fields were reshaped.

The Starwall was resurfaced completely. Every last outwardly facing stone was replaced, each of the new blocks was marked and treated as a component of an immense formation intended to absorb the force of blows laid upon them and unleash spikes of qi outward. Massive ballistae, designed for use by soul forging elders to guide immense qi-imbued bolts toward enemy immortals, where raised atop the wall at thirty-six points. The ground of the Killing Fields was raked and ditched, and huge stockpiles of dry brush were laid out such that they would unleash a devastating conflagration when defensive formations triggered upon the entry of demonic cultivators.

Dozens of additional, more localized or specialized, defenses were added to the fortification. Great effort and expense were necessary to conduct these projects, much of which would be lost to decay in a decade or two. "All wasted, if this flood works," Sayaana noted, even as she conceded it was the correct choice. Dependency upon a single plan's success was an inordinately foolish gamble.

Liao worked continually with Zhou Hua to manage the logistics of beaver runs and dam construction, and with Su Yi to avoid angering the husbandry pavilion or Grand Elder Itinay. The two women remained tight-faced rivals in many ways, but the expansive nature of the enterprise kept them far too busy to be truly hindered by such feelings or to ever address them openly.

Unexpectedly, Liao logged so many kilometers trudging back and forth across the basin that he experienced a phenomenon most cultivators only encountered following deadly battle: exhaustion. He fought past this using a combination of willpower and restorative pills for a time, but eventually, while on a return trip to Mother's Gift, nearly collapsed. His ability to present himself as competent to travel to Su Yi's inspection failed thereafter.

She ordered him to take the entire next winter off, spending his time purely devoted to cultivation. The schedule, she made fearsomely clear, would accommodate it.

It was a long winter. Liao slept a great deal and meditated a great deal more. He lost endless games to Zhou Hua in the evenings and dodged almost as many questions about how pretty he thought Su Yi was. Such needling made it clear that any restoration of intimacy to their relationship would never occur so long as he remained friends with the elder.

Upon his return to the field in the spring to oversee the final stages of dam construction – the beavers had by this point multiplied sufficiently as to need no further population supplementation – he discovered that the land had changed once again. This time, the source of the deviation was nothing he nor anyone else had done. Nor was it any natural permutation of the cyclical patterns of the wild world. No, this change came from the plague.

The demons had descended upon the basin. It was not something easily observed, the red-tainted forms remained scattered and mostly working their way through the mountains, but it could be felt immediately. The red haze that perpetually lay over the Ruined Wastes acquired a new, sharpened, flavor. The plague could not reason. It did not possess even that which might be called instinct, but neither was it without intent.

That intent lay heavily over the basin now.

Crimson hunger, the response to detection of a space to which the plague intended, needed, to expand, this was the power, the primal scream of need, that called the demon horde forth. The plague had scented a gap that it must fill.

This had not yet greatly changed the density of demons nearby. Those that had heard the call, many tens of thousands in number, remained dispersed across an immense territory. Most remained many hundreds of kilometers distant, a year or two at least from reaching the gateway at the slow pace with which they were drawn by the plague. Even so, the slow, inwardly-spiraling process that created the horde had advanced to a new stage. No small action, no piecemeal murder of ghouls, could stop it now. Even if he killed hundreds of ghouls in proximity to the gateway, thousands more would come, and it would do nothing save alert the demonic cultivators.

Yet what Liao could feel instantly, the other scouts as yet failed to notice. The cloaking formations that protected them from prying eyes also blinded their senses against this change. Small wonder that Mother's Gift had never before received a warning greater than a few months extent. "Stealth blinds the eyes on both sides," Sayaana explained with her face split into a wicked grin. "But you're invisible. It means you can see things no one else ever has." She found this grimly hilarious. The proximity of the horde fueled blood thirst in the remnant soul, the chance to extract any measure of vengeance on those who'd destroyed her world stirring passions often forgotten while trapped within stone.

Liao indulged this desire by silently shooting dead a small number of ogres he found near the critical dams. The oversized demons smashed and crushed their way through the forest as they moved, and there was a small chance that they might seriously damage one of his constructions should it intersect their path.

That summer he handled few beavers, seeding them only in areas where the population had for some reason vanished. Instead, he worked to prepare the key dams for collapse. Zhou Hua had brewed an immense supply of acidic concoctions for that purpose, solutions devoid of qi that would nevertheless serve to gradually weaken the superstructures of the barriers over the course of the winter.

As the summer solstice passed by, the number of ghouls that crawled across the mountains increased greatly. Artemay, running extraordinarily complex matrix calculations, determined that the horde would pierce the gateway sometime between the next two solstices if not forestalled. Knowing this, only a single step remained to prepare, one Liao had minimal desire to conduct and relied upon Sayaana to steel himself against. Killing was something he had come to expect, but the coming slaughter demanded far too much.

Until the arrival of Snow Feast revealed its absolute necessity.