Unseen Cultivator

Qing Liao was presently at home. He was quietly working away stenciling in complex geometric decorations on a pair of boots made from the thick and rough hide of a rhinoceros. The great horned animals were found in some number in the jungle-covered hills to the southwest, beyond the edge of the mountains. Many rare and strange animals resided in that region, as did plants and even gemstones, making it fertile ground for his gathering enterprises. He had spent much of the last century working his way through those warm and humid environments, for they offered a far better harvest than most other directions, especially as the sect continued to prohibit him from traveling over water to islands or distant continents.

Liao could not even disagree with that policy over much. Atop open water, he remained uniquely visible from a great distance, especially from the heights where immortals were most likely to roam. For the same reason he had long avoided the vast, and extremely barren, range of the Towering Peaks Plateau to the west. The grasslands and the deserts to the north possessed sufficient cover to ameliorate this problem and had offered somewhat more success. Liao had spent the better part of a decade prospecting in those environments, but once the novelty had worn away, he found no eagerness to return. The presence of a closed canopy above his head offered a distinct layer of comfort, one that had become, as he grew more seasoned in his wandering, a profound preference.

It seemed that, more than any form of terrain, he considered the forest his proper home in the wild.

He was, when Grand Elder Itinay arrived, working alone. His courtyard suffered, once again, from the idle neglect it had often displayed in times past. It was now a rather rare occasion to find him at home, and he had few visitors indeed. Su Yi was busy in the Killing Fields, leading one of the teams constructing the massive Firebird Formation. That project, which had been designed as the final disposition of the fenghuang bird sculpture he recovered many years ago, had been under construction for over two decades, and had years left. When the elder took a chance to relax amid her labors, Liao inevitably visited her, as was proper, rather than the reverse.

As for the companionship of Zhou Hua that had for almost seventy years filled his courtyard with strange scents, his hall with books, and his blankets with feminine warmth, that relationship had run its course. It had done so in the manner most typical for cultivators. The alchemist prodigy had advanced to the awareness integration realm. The variation in power this induced made continued intimacy difficult, and such ties were soon severed.

If Liao had regrets, it was only that he could not keep the pace set by his one-time classmate. Having reached the second layer of the fourth major realm in a mere century and a half, Zhou Hua was accounted a true prodigy. She was rising towards the heavens at a pace not seen since the incredible record laid down by Onimray centuries earlier.

Liao had, himself, reached the fifth layer of the thought weaving realm, but he knew that he had quite a way to go. It was unlikely in the extreme that he would ever catch up. Though his own progress counted as perfectly acceptable and was in truth quite rapid compared to the average, that did not make it easy to watch a peer leap ahead with seemingly effortless ease.

He further doubted that he would ever be able to forge a real relationship, romantic or otherwise, with any of the many younger cultivators who now filled the burgeoning ranks of the sect. A somewhat regrettable thought, but not one he'd yet taken any action to ameliorate. Zhou Hua was currently in closed door cultivation; her breakthrough having inspired a seemingly continual desire to pursue advancement. Liao hoped to try and restore their friendship, if not their lost intimacy, when she next emerged. That would be soon enough.

Though his personal affairs were of minimal interest to anyone else in the sect – Liao knew there was some gossip regarding him, but little of it moved beyond speculation as to his activities in the wild – he assumed that Grand Elder Itinay was perfectly aware of every detail from long before her appearance in his gateway.

That the grand elder had come to see him directly, rather than offering a summons, was unexpected, an almost scandalously informal move. This instantly put Liao on edge, for Itinay did not act idly. He might not be privy to the thoughts of the sect's leadership, but he knew divisions existed in the planning of the grand elders. As a unique pawn, he did his best to avoid such attention.

The icy blue immortal gave the small courtyard, and the disciple it contained, a single furious glare. Liao felt as if he'd been blasted by the front of a mountain blizzard, only for it to pass over like lightning.

"Walk with me," Itinay ordered, and Liao scrambled to obey. Her voice was hard, and the increase in her power, one he'd felt just days earlier in the same moment as everyone else, made her all the more intimidating.

They walked. Their path moved swiftly outward from the busy center of the sect to the cleared and packed ground lying at the inside base of the Starwall. This hard and empty earth, a ten-meter buffer used to store defensive supplies and allow for rapid mustering before any cropland began, offered a measure of privacy. Patrols walked the wall above, but it took only a modest amount of vocal control to keep voices from working their way up to the crest of the mighty masonry defense.

"You have done good work while I was away," Itinay began. She looked straight ahead, not bothering to face him. "I might have prioritized certain substances differently, but it is pointless to complain to one who fulfilled the duties given to him. And, you have also grown stronger in the interim, which is good. It allows you to act with greater flexibility. The thoroughness with which that talented young alchemist managed your operations is notable," she added with just the slightest hint of edge.

"Whatever the personal considerations, I hope you will be able to continue to partner with her in all future endeavors. Her exacting demands for information, and the thoroughness with which you fulfilled them, have provided us with critical information. That information, in turn, has granted us time that we would not otherwise possess, and in war, time is a critical resource."

Though the words were complimentary, they also had a hole within them. A test, Liao recognized. He was intended to guess as to what it might be that he had discovered by accident. Zhou Hua demanded he record everything, from animal herds to weather patterns, and she'd covered map after map with a sea of symbols every time he returned from the wilderness. Though he had found much of the notetaking required tedious in the extreme, he continued the practice to the present while reporting to Elder Fu Jin in the alchemist's absence.

The elders had always seemed pleased to be presented with such voluminous data.

Something in that vast assembly of information had proven useful to Itinay. It was merely a question of which component, which set of lines and points, that it might have been. A puzzle, one Liao was obligated to solve with few clues at hand.

He began with elimination. All the records of plants, animals, and other resources could be discarded immediately. Though he had, in the tropical southern lands, found new fiber sources that would be valuable to a weaver, he knew Itinay would never consider such a thing critical. He similarly discounted the ruins he'd mapped and artifacts he'd recovered. Though those articles were not without utility, even something as powerful as the fenghuang sculpture required immense investment to turn to valuable use, and most were barely more than trinkets by comparison.

With all physical objects removed, he was left only with information. Some set of records describing something he'd witnessed beyond the typical reach of the scouts. That must be the key.

Liao had, over the decades, sighted demonic cultivators a handful of times. They had, thank the Celestial Mother, always been high up in the sky and moving swiftly elsewhere. He doubted those few scattered reports offered any insight to anyone, even an immortal mind. Snow Feast, the only traitor he'd spotted more than once, appeared to be notably erratic in his movements. The demonic cultivator had a tendency to let the weather blow him about, flowing from one place to the next in response to the storm winds of winter. Weather lore might help to predict his motions, but it would always be little more than a guess.

Discarding the motions of such powerful entities left only one real possibility, one thing that Itinay might care out in the Ruined Wastes. "Something has changed among the demons?"

He phrased this as a question, partly out of deference, but primarily because the very idea was terrifying. In nearly a century of wandering in the wilderness, Liao had slain close to ten thousand demons – an estimate, he did not do anything so crude as keep a running tally. Those kills had been concentrated in the hills and valleys far to the south, mostly around fallen cities. Artemay had encouraged that stratagem, seeking to draw any attention a pattern of attrition might produce far away from the gateway.

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Though the absolute number sounded large, Liao knew it was truly very modest. An immortal such as Itinay, set loose in the Ruined Wastes, could slaughter that many demons in a single day.

Throughout the entire period, the demons had been completely unchanging. The plague that guided them possessed potent instincts, but no ability to reason. It could induce greater effort but never attempt anything truly novel. The possibility of a change, of an alteration in the great scourge's behavior, was absolutely terrifying.

"In a sense." If Itinay was impressed by the deduction she gave no sign. "My sister Artemay has examined your many reports and maps using some impressively complex mathematics." If an immortal claimed such a thing, Liao knew the equations must be truly mind-bending. "And has concluded that the demons near to Mother's Gift have just begun to adopt an inward, spiral-based, motion progression. This is the first stage in the formation of a demon horde. Though the numbers lack exactitude, it is plausible. A sufficient amount of time has passed."

It had. That math, a simple plot of the periodic frequency of invasions against the immensity of centuries, was simple enough for anyone to understand. Liao could solve that system himself, without difficulty. If anything, the present interval had been unexpectedly lengthy.

"You are not surprised. That's good," Itinay noted. The Grand Elder had adopted a rather swift walking pace, one that carried them at the very edge of the speed Liao could reliably maintain without breaking into a jog. "Tell me, how do you think the sect should respond to this discovery?"

"I-." Liao stopped. He had started to say that, as he was merely a disciple, it was not his place to offer any possibilities. But Itinay's question overrode such natural deference. She wanted him to answer, and he had no trouble determining why. The ability of the scouts to act beyond the gateway was very limited, and there was nothing they could do to successfully prevent the formation of a horde. It had been tried, many times, to great tragedy. Combat compromised their protective formations far too swiftly. Any preemptive action, whatever might be decided, would rely upon his hands to manufacture.

Realizing this, he fell into a prolonged silence. Walking at such a rapid pace, he focused himself entirely on this possibility, on what might be done. He passed through one hundred strides, considering and rejecting nearly as many possibilities. "If math reveals the horde is forming," he imagined some complex equation, one that described the motion of hundreds of tokens moving about a spinning chaser board. "Can it not also reveal how to break it? Or to at least delay its formation? With every additional year, the sect grows in strength."

The total number of cultivators had recently surpassed fifteen hundred, and those of his generation were increasingly entering the thought weaving realm in consistent numbers. New elders had also emerged, even if losses in tribulations reduced the rate of accumulation. It was even rumored that Xun Haoyu, of the armoring pavilion, was very close to her attempt to seize immortality.

"You are thinking on the right path," Itinay acknowledged this with a nod. "It is the opinion of the elder council that, if at all possible, a means must be found to prevent this incursion before it occurs. You do not need to know precisely why, but it is essential. This comes with the attendant difficulty that, as always, any method deployed must be one that cannot be detected by outside observers. Dispatching you to simply slaughter all the ghouls in a critical region is not viable."

This was nothing new. Liao had long been ordered not to kill demons near the gateway for precisely this reason. As to how a vast mass of demons might be driven off otherwise, he had no idea. Predators did not attack them, ever, and weather did not harm them. He had, in the northern steppe, seen a ghoul standing with perfect calm and not the least injury next to an antelope that had frozen solid. "Is that possible?" He asked cautiously. The grand elder surely had a plan already, likely several.

"It is," Itinay nodded. "That sculpture you recovered, the fenghuang, it could be used to trigger a massive forest fire, one that would sweep all before it from the mountains to the rivers. That plan has already been prepared, as a failsafe, but it has many flaws and might not provide a delay of more than a few decades."

She stopped, very suddenly, going from rapid strides to absolutely frozen in a single step. Then she turned to face him, bearing down with the full force of her glowing, blue-white visage. "I believe we can do much better. There is a way, some means to destroy the horde as it gathers, that will preserve the secrecy of Mother's Gift for at least another century. Fire is the most destructive choice, but others exist. You have much experience in the wild. The two of you together surpass the entirety of the remainder of the sect. Think. Discern the possibility."

Fire, though listed and discarded, offered an inspiration. It could, and did, kill ghouls. He has seen that as well. Taking that as the seed, he considered various other forms of wide-ranging devastation. Many such things, grand upheavals all, he'd witnessed in person.

Sayaana appeared before him as he contemplated, though she directed her hard expression and brilliant emerald eyes at Itinay instead. Finding speech anchoring, Liao began to work through the list aloud. "Landslides and avalanches kill many ghouls, but they are limited in space." It was the easiest option to reject. Such events were not uncommon in the mountains to the west and the canyons to the east. They might kill scores of ghouls and a handful of ogres. They even possessed the power to occasionally smash giants flat, should the rocks fall perfectly. Though he cheered when such things unfolded, it was not enough to stop a horde, not unless the onslaught could be perfectly timed to strike a packed mass. The effect was simply too small.

"Earthquakes do not do enough damage." He had endured several such events, the terrifying shaking and rumbling of the ground itself. They could knock down trees and shift stones with more than enough strength to kill humans and demons alike, but the erratic nature of the damage meant that only the unlucky few out of the many would be harmed. He had seen that too, amidst a great herd of wild asses. Worse, he had no idea as to how such a thing might be induced.

The same problem applied to the great fiery mountains known as volcanoes. He had seen, from the eastern shore in the south, one of those terrible cones belch fire into the sky, turn it black, and make it rain rock. Should one of the mountains to the west suddenly sprout flames, that would surely serve, but Liao doubted even immortals could command such things.

"Storms also, they are not powerful enough." Howling winds and whirling ice could kill ghouls by spinning stones through the air or hurling the demons into tree trunks, but even the most potent of tempests would only kill a small fraction of those impacted. Not enough to prevent a horde from gathering. "Neither are floods," he added a moment after. Demons did not need to breathe and could not drown. A surge could smash them flat, but rising waters were not enough on their own.

Or so Liao believed, until Sayaana threw out a counter for the first time. "A tidal wave could do it," she spoke softly but clearly. "The ocean, in flood, can lay waste to the land. This basin is wide and flat, form a tidal wave and wash it over the entire plain."

Upon relaying this mad suggestion to the grand elder, Liao watched as immortal eyes churned in calculation. "A wave sufficient to sweep across the entire basin, west to east, shattering the forest and scouring the land down to stone," she spoke after a pause of several minutes during which, Liao observed carefully, she forgot to breathe. "It might be possible, if every river were dammed and released at once, and even if it did not universally kill, such a massive motion of water would scatter the horde. Most would be pushed downstream at least as far as the end of the gorges, some to the ocean itself. It would take many decades before they returned westward. It could be disguised, potentially. Immense floods of that kind are rare, but they can happen, over thousands of years." She turned and looked Liao up and down. "But we do not have thousands of years. We have a decade, or perhaps a decade and a half, at most, to prepare. How many dams could you build in that time?"

It was a reasonable counter. Liao knew how to build dams and weirs, generally. He suspected that, with proper instruction, he could master the craft swiftly. A single glance at Sayaana suggested that she, being from a land of rivers and thick forests, was very familiar with the approach. He was strong enough, now, to haul about large logs and stones quite easily.

He imagined he might be able to dam the Great Eastern River and the three largest tributaries in ten years, and perhaps one or two others, but the labor needed to create a truly cataclysmic flood was vast beyond that. It would require dams everywhere, hundreds at least, enough to convert the whole of the basin into a marsh and the western boundary mountains into a giant reservoir.

Far too much for any one cultivator. He doubted even an immortal could accomplish it. Even with nearly limitless strength, there was only so much earth that could be moved, alone.

The insight that came next, Qing Liao could only, and would always, credit to Sayaana. It sourced to the furred hide used to produce her boots, a fur noted for its density and its water-resistant properties. Properties sourced to an animal that not only lived in water, but that built dams. Born to a trapper, Liao knew them well.

Itinay desired a disaster whose origin could not be traced to the work of any cultivator. Liao could not think of any better than one that could not be traced to any human action at all. "I cannot build many," he answered with growing inspiration and enthusiasm. "But beavers can produce endless dams. They simply need to be brought to the right place. Breed thousands of beavers and I will carry them across the basin and the mountains. They will cover the land in dams. The rest is simply a matter of coordinating a mass collapse." That, he suspected, was a problem Artemay's complicated equations could solve.

The grand elder stood there, and Liao was witness to the rare privilege of an immortal struck dumb by a combination of creativity, audacity, and madness. Sayaana, inaudible to the icy audience, broke out into wild laughter, but at the same time, Liao felt encouragement flow through their bond. The remnant soul believed in this bizarre scheme. She must have experience in something similar, on a smaller scale. Her northern homeland was full of beavers and their workings.

"Beavers," blue lips twisted slightly, a phantom smile graced them, swiftly suppressed. "An appropriate plan from the mouth of a trapper, and yet, not without potential. A major flood, even one confined to the Great Eastern River alone, might serve to delay the horde for a decade. I will speak to my sister Ohlay." This declaration represented essential agreement on the principle. Ohlay was the head of the husbandry pavilion, it would fall upon her to coordinate the beaver breeding program this plan required. "For now, report to my sister Artemay. She will have some few specific demons to kill that might purchase a few months more without drawing notice."

Stunned, Liao dared to wonder what he had just set in motion, and if he would be able to survive it.