Unseen Cultivator

A vast rush of qi flooded into Qing Liao's brain. The universe slowed. Everything seemed to proceed at a reduced speed, the intervals between each thought, each moment, extended immensely. The actions his mind demanded of his body, every reflex and autonomous motion, stalled. His mind dispatched commands at a speed faster than the flesh could absorb and react against. An asynchronous instability took shape even as his mind exploded through long-awaited expansion.

Conscious control of thought patterns. That was what qi promised, what it unleashed. New instincts whispered through the blaze of the breakthrough. The ability to tell the lungs to expand and contract, breathing manually. The power to command the heart to beat. Even greater, the ability to assemble a list of commands that flesh and bone must obey without fail. These possibilities, and countless others, erupted at once.

A deadly temptation, the power to command that which he did not understand.

Orday's writings had counseled against any such actions, a stern warning laid down in the cosmic delineation of the sage. Though a moment of confusion threatened to consume Liao as he struggled to comprehend what was happening, that direction soon asserted itself and he returned to himself thereafter. At least, he did so in some part.

Energy continued to flood through his mind. It demanded to be moved, to be used. Like a flood of water spreading across dry ground, it must flow, it could not stop, that was not possible. If it was not channeled properly, it would carve out a path on its own. A path through the base of his mind.

That could not, must not, be allowed to happen. Such a failure would erase all that Qing Liao was. Control must be obtained.

Thankfully, the terrain of his mind was far from flat and empty. Channels, carved by experience, by training, by trauma, by life, already existed. If the mind was a forest – and this image sprang forth at once, wholly unprompted, impelled by some unspoken primordial connection to the dao itself – then it was wild and disordered, but even the deepest, most twisted wilderness was not without countless paths.

He knew this, down in his very core. Animal trails, water drip channels, wind-carved corridors, and even fallen logs all forged routes through the tangle. Tracklessness was an illusion; one presented to those who did not know how to see. No matter how exotic their origins, they existed. The patterns, the network, of thoughts born of instructed experience spread across five decades of life.

At this moment, crushed beneath a massive liquid weight of qi, those paths were overwhelmed. Bursting beyond all capacity, they were disordered, insufficient. The onslaught of energy blurred their boundaries and threatened to bury them all in the rush. Second by second, as the mind buckled and flexed through the bottomless power and unbearable rush of accelerated comprehension qi granted it, the channels eroded. As those paths ground away, they gnawed at the connections that formed the sense of self.

Floodwater leaves no paths behind. Everything scoured free, the soul reborn even as the body remained. That was the destiny that awaited if he froze, if he did nothing to halt the power of qi.

But Liao was a cultivator. That empty surrender was never an option. Already, driven only by formless instinct, he had begun to fight back. Dredging the channels of the mind, Liao deepened his ties to critical moments, reinforced his self against the onrushing tide. It was easy, images leaped into play, swords thrust down to grab that power.

Su Yi's perfect face, seen for the first time. The touch of the stars, on the roof of the recruit's dormitory. The first terrible glimpse of a ghoul.

Driving his dagger into the throat of Deng Sheng.

He stopped. The soul snarled, and the core essence of the cultivator reared up, spiraling out from his dantian. He would not be ruled by animal instinct or petty emotion. He was himself, forever, and more than a random collection of scars and fancies.

"As a member of the Textiles Pavilion, I advise you to approach the breakthrough to the thought weaving realm using the most literal interpretation of those words you can devise," Grand Elder Itinay had offered this counsel in a voice as cold as ice.

This too had seared its way into his memory and surfaced once more in the moment.

Weave the thoughts. Form a composition. Turn the rush along the channels of warp and weft.

That was how a weaver would do it. Qing Liao was not a weaver. He had not, in preparing for this moment, placed a loom before his hands.

He was seated in a grove in the forest, surrounded by bamboo. A forest that offered him all the needs and trials of life.

Experience, long years in the forest, had carved those lines, those trails, in all directions. Traplines, root harvesting circuits, bamboo shoot patches, clear water sources, bird's nests, vegetable clusters, and many more. Life in the forest inevitably revealed layer after layer within that forest, matching but not identical to the whole.

Power raced down those trails, imprinted the wild, the existence of the trapper, the hermit, and the leatherworker, deep in qi and mind. The connection to Sayaana on his brow sang with clarity and reassurance, a greater empathic linkage than he'd ever accessed before. He felt the green and verdant side of him deepen. The forest all around blossomed with detail, sharpened understanding revealed things never before seen. Colors, textures, shades, contrasts, scents, the whole backdrop refined and upscaled.

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It was not that his senses that had grown stronger. He received no more information than before. Only his ability to interpret, to process that vast stream of input had evolved.

But he was not merely a resident of the forest. Night fell, and even as Liao's mind swan in the throes of breakthrough, darkness asserted itself across his understanding. Darkness and starlight.

Liao looked upward and saw the thousands of stars whirling overhead.

Not just a cultivator of the forest. Not simply a being compressed into a tiny sliver of space between dirt and sky. Recollection flashed. Artemay, holding him in the black expanse high above the earth. Another moment, red, his body bound in the depths with demon qi above and the endless power of the earth resting deep down below.

He did not push his qi into the endless black high above or the molten fires deep below. Instead, he reached out and claimed all the space between. Seemingly small, it was, in another perspective, infinite.

From the deepest hidden roots found tunneling into the heart of the earth to the highest floating bauble of life clinging to the edge of the clouds, he let his thoughts expand. Connections, linkages, emerged all along the way, from the bottom to the top. They guided him, tracing his progress and directing the qi. Weak, for now, such paths, built upon tenuous memories and slender threads of knowledge, but present. A foundation that would grow until it was ready to bind him to himself.

A trapper, he claimed all the prizes of the world, high skies and deep canyons, and all the endless sides between. Threads, aligned and networked, thrown guidelines of a hunting spider, claimed all those anchor points. Distance meant nothing in the ambition of the mind. Time, and future layers to be laid, would fill in this skeleton, weave the web.

Not that merely imagining it made it happen. That would be far too easy. Each trial, each canal of qi racing through the interval of his thoughts, had to be laid down on a track of memories. The labor applied was immense, and the construction demanded as material every experience acquired in the short fifty years of his life. From the pleasant recollections lying just below the surface to the long-suppressed horrors ripped free of the lightless depths at a bitter price in pain, the breakthrough claimed all of it. The whole of Qing Liao's thoughts, every memory, every dream, every belief, was required.

Anything left behind would be lost.

It took weeks. It hurt like hell, a scourge of relief and joy and suffering replaying an entire life. Mental exhaustion piled up as he was forced to scour through his history at brutal speeds. The tapestry of the mind did not form easily or without the constant corrections of errors and elimination of illusions. If not for the pills constantly nurturing his tissue and delaying the need for water and food, he would have surely collapsed. Qi exhaustion would have plunged him free from the breakthrough, all progress loss. Or worse, he might have desperately sought to cannibalize his own tissues to sustain the process, leading to a breakthrough in cultivation but a permanent crippling of the flesh.

Thankfully, the sect had provisioned him well. He was able to endure the prolonged work of mental construction, miserable but whole.

Slowly, the network Liao assembled inside his head gained stability and began to self-reinforce. As the canals of qi carried thoughts through his brain at previously inconceivable speeds the world grew not only sharper, but it also acquired increased clarity as well. Questions he had long pondered in puzzlement suddenly resolved. Deficiencies in his thoughts, errors left to fester, washed away.

An innate understanding attached itself to his perception as he acquired active control over his senses. Limited, still, for this was only the first layer, but already his reasoning accelerated beyond the capacity of even a cognitive master mortal. Not smarter, cultivation did not impart genius, but faster, able to calculate at incredible rates, to reason through multiple possibilities while a mortal struggled to complete the evaluation of the first one.

This spiral of growth, the ability to move faster and faster the further he proceeded, was the only thing that made the completion of the process possible. Liao relived his memories at an ever-accelerating pace, a dreamlike revelation without any of the loss of logic or recognition that a true dream would induce. Imagination grew in capacity. Visualization unlocked a new level of detail and complexity he'd never previously considered possible.

As the weeks passed, he rushed toward the present, and conclusion. There was no dramatic moment when everything halted, no burst of power. The pressure weighting down his mind simply dropped away, over and over, until it was no more. The floodwaters fully absorbed, saturating the soil of the mind. Only clarity remained, an enhanced perception and processing power. The world he now experienced existed at a level of detail beyond anything he'd encountered in his now thoroughly completed examination of the past.

His skills, his various pretensions to understanding and mastery, were revealed as the illusionary braggadocio of youth and nothing more. His leatherworking, the accomplishments of which he'd been so proud only weeks before, now haunted him for the countless tiny mistakes embedded throughout.

In his first motion after arising from the trance, Qing Liao took the bowcase he'd fashioned as his first true thrust towards the sublime mastery of the dao and cast it down into the dust. Thousands of imperfections spread across its every surface under the merciless discernment of his new sight. All that he'd seen as excellent before now sprouted countless flaws.

At the very same time, an infinite world of possibilities, of new sources of beauty and symmetry, emerged.

"I'm going to have to start over," he whispered through cracked and parched lips.

"Yes," Sayaana's voice, silent throughout the process, returned with warmth and welcome. "The dao always demands new beginnings. You have a good attitude, it will come. Besides, you will still need everything you've already learned for the next step."

It was not a glorious endorsement, but it elevated Liao critically all the same. A new beginning, that was, he agreed immediately, the right way to view this change. It was as if he'd become a cultivator for the first time all over again. He supposed it would be the first of many such new starts.

When feeling finally returned to his limbs he took the remaining pills and drank down the fortified water set aside for recovery. Several days passed while he remained in the grove fortifying his new cultivation and coming to grips with the full scope of his new sensory processing capability. It took time before he could balance brights and darks, soft and thunderous, and longer to balance and move about correctly. To recognize his hands as his own, and the forest as familiar once more, required adjustment, adaptation, and acceptance.

It also required reflection, a willingness to understand how far he'd come and how far remained for him to go.

The last was a terrifying thought, to consider that this was only step fifteen of fifty, but it was also an unbelievably wondrous one.