Unseen Cultivator

Years passed. Qing Liao rummaged his way across the continent, moving from mountains to coast and back again. He gathered artifacts, animal parts, herbs, minerals, and anything else Zhou Hua chose to add to her ever-growing list as he passed. Mortals were born, lived, and died. The Celestial Origin Sect expanded. New cultivators joined its ranks. Established cultivators grew in power. Elders challenged the Heavens, some lived, some did not. The defenses of the Killing Fields grew ever stronger and more detailed.

Through it all, Itinay sat in a lotus pose atop Mount Tianlang in the west. Tall stones, raised up from the earth, surrounded her on all sides, leaving only the world directly above visible. She stared perpetually toward the sky, deep in contemplation of the universe, the dao, and her place in the grand drama. All her energy stood devoted towards the long-neglected effort of cultivation, the determination to take another step toward the heavens.

Stellar qi surrounded her. Its power filled her to the edge of bursting. A supply more than sufficient to push her strength across the threshold and reach the next plateau. That was not the challenge she faced. Nothing physical, nothing mental, not even the fulfillment of the soul served as an obstacle at this stage. Such base considerations had long since been surpassed. Only the dao remained.

A cultivator in the celestial ascendancy realm was a living expression of their dao. Advancement was, as Itinay knew absolutely, a simple process. It was nothing more or less than increasing her mastery, her embodiment, of that dao. The increased fusion of the personal and the heavenly.

Simple but not easy. In truth, it was very much the opposite. It was the hardest of all things. To approach the dao was to move further away from it. Force, indomitable will, endless resolve, these traits offered neither guide nor aid. Attempting to push toward the infinite would only cause it to recede into the distance.

There was only self-knowledge, and the extension of that from one into all.

Itinay knew this perfectly well. She had achieved the second layer of the realm thousands of years ago, a step that many immortals never made. The remainder of the path lay open before her, but further movement had long evaded her efforts. Short cultivation sessions, even those whose length was measured in double-digit months, did not suffice. Too many distractions, too many endlessly woven schemes; these formed a wall between her and the essential truths she must unlock. She had not devoted sufficient time to cleansing, to discarding all diversions, in long ages. Not since shortly after the demon war ended.

To win the war, she must ignore the war. A frustrating paradox that made her want to scream. It was, accordingly, where she began.

Hers was not, it came to her after a long period of slow, critical reflection, a dao of warfare, of martial conflict. She was not a warrior like her sister Akiray. Nor was hers the path of management or strategy, as was her sister Neay's road. The scheming, the plots, the countless deceptions, these were tasks she had set for herself, duties she had placed upon her shoulders in the belief that circumstances, that the needs of the day, demanded them.

The old world endured for thousands of years without widespread warfare. Itinay, coming into her strength even as war erupted anew for the first time in millennia, had discovered in herself a talent for the warp and weft of battle, for the plotting of the weave of devastation. Seeing in this skill an obligation, she had laid it atop her choices. Many had been saved from destruction by that decision, and the shape of Mother's Gift altered forever, but these things were not her dao.

They were, rather, something her dao had obligated her to adopt.

The Twelve Sisters were stars. Twelve streams of light that traced their origin to the deep reaches of the heavens. Their mother had bound herself to the overarching stellar dao, a vast, broad concept. None of her daughters had dared claim such an expansive understanding as their own. They had gone deeper instead. Orday's dao was the stars. Her daughters were each a form of star, nested within the brilliance of the heavens. Each shown with a specific radiance, distinct and unique.

In this way, Itinay was no different from any of her sisters.

Slowly, as day after day passed, she worked herself down to this fundamental conception of who she was. Everything else no longer mattered. Here, floating beneath the heavens, she was, and would remain, until some manner of resolution was wrenched forth from the black sea above. The rest could be left to her sisters, stars born of the same seed. She could, would, trust them above all others.

The surrounding world faded from perception. Stone, soil, trees, wind, rain, and even the air itself, her awareness moved beyond all these things. As her body drank in stellar qi, her awareness moved in a singular direction, upward, ever upwards. There, in the black emptiness beyond the boundaries of the world, the stars lay waiting forever.

And so did her dao.

Fire. That was the first insight, one Itinay had obtained long ago at the close of the demon war. Barely understood in the moment of revelation, her comprehension had gradually refined in the long years since. All the stars were fire. Titanic, endless orbs of burning brightness lodged in the incomprehensibly wide expanse of dark emptiness.

They were, each of them in their multitudes, variable. Each one differed, possessed of tiny variations in the qi they produced beyond the overwhelming core of stellar qi that fueled their central fires. They burned, and in so doing produced light and heat for all the worlds, without which all would be cold and lost.

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Vastness. That was the second insight. Thousands of hours spent staring at the heavens, measuring and calculating, had allowed her immortal mind to perceive their reality. Not points, the stars, but suns. Immense orbs of material, pure beyond compare to any object on earth, and many times the size of their little world. Hundreds or perhaps even thousands of times greater. This world upon which she rested, it was a mere speck compared to the grandeur of the sun. Small wonder the power of stellar qi was so great.

Truly, they lived in a universe of stars. Everything else was an afterthought, mere debris.

A slightly terrifying thought, this understanding of scale, but at the same time a comforting one. It made the plague, the great enemy, seem very small.

Vast fires in the void, this was the source, the nature, of her dao. Knowing this was profound, a truth of such power and strength that it sufficed to grasp immortality.

But not enough to progress to ascension.

Itinay knew she needed more, much more. A greater understanding of the stars, of their patterns and their variations, of the means by which they conveyed a variable dao that encompassed fourteen very different women.

Focused now on her cultivation, on the mystery of the difference between her and the other sisters, Itinay stared deep into the heavens and drank in the qi from above Not from the stars as a whole, or even divided into groups and constellations, but instead one star after another in sequence. Over and over, hundreds, then thousands, including countless stars only the enhanced vision of an immortal could pick out from the darkness.

Every one unique, possessed of a specific signature of qi, a spectral sign that was never truly duplicated. She assembled a list, an archive, of ten thousand lights, each difference from the last. Comparing, sorting, she stared at the endless entries and cross-referenced them against the dao of her sisters, certain the truth lay there. The identity of her dao.

Decades passed. Her differentiation increased, and with it her ability to sort and match the stars to the dao of her sisters. Iay, of the blinding white giants, largest, purest, and most powerful of all, was the easiest. Akiray, red, masterful, and flaring in conflict, was another she discerned without much trouble. So too Ohlay, identified and bound to the warm and life-granting light of the sun above their heads. Others were far more difficult, and her own place remained the most challenging of all to discover.

It did not seem to exist at all, the condensed icy blue chill she imagined burning within her. Not, at least, until she witnessed an event that caused her to add an additional dimension to her far-reaching catalogue of stellar qi.

High above, deep in the western sky, a star died. Itinay saw it, the full process unfolded across an immense distance of space and time. There was a sudden, final, increase in brightness and then an explosion of power of such enormity that the barest echo of its qi shocked her to her core. That rush of energy, it utterly dwarfed even that which her ascended mother had unleashed, a power such that it would scour away the world down to its iron core and leave nothing behind. A power beyond the ability of any life to ever possibly contain.

Such was the death of a star, and that end came at the conclusion of a stretch of time even an immortal might struggle to properly conceptualize. Watching it unfold stunned, but in the aftermath of such shocks, truths were unveiled. This end, this dynamic devastating destruction, it was not her end.

Stars were born and died and were reborn across a cycle of eternities, but while giant stars passed through the process with the swiftness of mayflies, others existed that were ancient trees in comparison.

And her dao was attuned to the latter. It lay out there in the dark, this truth, strange but impossible to deny. Though she was young by the standards of immortals, her dao was old, sourced to a cold eternity yet to come, one not yet seen in this time when the warm embrace of brilliant brightness dominated the heavens.

Stars changed in time, and though their qi was ever their own, color and spectra could shift, much as the pigmentation of a mortal woman's hair altered with age. Red, Itinay discovered, would become blue as the ancient and steady little orbs reached their final era before the long descent down into lightless darkness. There, in the blue that was yet to be, the blue that lay at the edge of the final guttering blackness, she found the truest expression of her dao.

The last light before the darkness overwhelms.

A cold and calculating light, one that mercilessly husbanded resources to keep the star burning for as long as possible in a desperate fight to stave off the inevitable. Uncompromising, harsh, and yet at the same time the bearer of final hope when all other lights had failed.

The demon war had shaped her. Itinay always knew this, she was among a very small group of immortals who broke through to the celestial ascendancy realm during that terrible century of conflict. Now, she realized how profound that influence had truly been. She had aligned the whole of her purpose, her path and her way, in opposition to that scourge.

It was not in her to build like her sister Neay, or to exalt, as Iay did, or any of the other existences her sisters chose. Instead, she persevered. The enemy was to be sealed away, cast into the darkness beyond the reach of all remaining light. Never would she surrender what she defended, and no method would be rejected if it could prolong that final stand by even a second. A stand, she realized through her connection with stellar qi, that could endure a very long time indeed. The last eon of light would not necessarily be shorter, or less worthy, than any that came before it.

A small eternity, but one that was hers to protect.

The dao resonated with this discovery, and in a sudden rush Itinay felt it wash through her. The way opened, one step more, and the power that followed this discernment came into her hands. Claimed already, without violence or fanfare, for it had always been hers to wield. Every cell in her body, from the tip of her toes to the core of her dantian, flushed full of energy as she moved one step closer to the true stellar being that waited in the heavens at the final joining.

No dramatic burst of power spread across Mother's Gift at this attainment. No blasts of heavenly lightning descended. There were no visible dramatic signs of any kind. Itinay simply blinked once, the first shift of her vision in over a decade, and stood up.

But all who touched upon qi throughout that hidden land felt this change and knew that new strength had joined them.

Leaving the trance of prolonged cultivation in success, Itinay found her sister Artemay waiting nearby. The blue-skinned alchemist greeted her with a smile, but also a warning. "Welcome back sister. It has been ninety-one years. We must prepare. A horde is coming soon."