Unseen Cultivator

Amami Yoko knew a trick to traveling beneath the sea unobserved. It happened that, at a modest distance below the surface a few hundred meters down where the light rapidly faded, all impacts from waves above ceased to penetrate the depths and the waters grew almost perfectly still. This shifting point served as a natural barrier, not only to light and heat, but also to the flow of most forms of qi. This layer was called the thermocline, a word new to Qing Liao, and the best stratagem to avoid notice was to remain below it as much as possible.

However, such depths were never meant for human existence, and even for cultivators achieving prolonged concealment in this manner required a specific dive pattern. It resembled that used by the elusive tusked whales of the deep ocean. At their level of cultivator, both travelers possessed sufficiently increased lung capacity and pressure resistance that they could mimic this motion. When the ocean born warrior proposed the approach Liao immediately agreed, seeing the wisdom at once.

The first few dives, for which Liao stripped nearly naked to streamline his swimming, did not go well. He could swim, having learned in mountain ponds as a child and been forced to better the skill under Sayaana's tutelage. Among the residents of Mother's Gift he was better than almost all save those born into fishing families, but Amami Yoko would have brutally shamed even those.

The warrior sliced through the water with a dolphin's swift grace, effortlessly elegant and with her breathing perfectly timed to the sinuous process of ascent and descent. She evidenced no discomfort at all in exposure to the dim shadows of the deep and did not so much as twitch as pulses of qi traceable to frightfully large animals moving about beyond the limited visual range even qi-enhanced eyesight allowed in the dark passed along the edge of their senses.

Liao could only follow her awkwardly, straining to keep pace. Lurching and lunging, it took him far greater effort to keep up with his new companion. The entire process was tiring and frustrating in turn. It was also slow. They could have easily traveled many times faster running across the surface, or even just skimming through the waves.

He came very close to suggesting such an approach several times, until he felt Scoria Scorn pass by high overhead.

The pair responded to that ping of furious, heated, metal-tinged demonic qi biting into their senses by diving hard in tandem, no words necessary. They dropped down into the black deeper than ever before, until they could no longer sense any sign of the demonic cultivator. Staying down until the lack of air finally forced them to surface briefly, they spent more than an hour in the lightless, frigid, crushing darkness.

When they erupted, gasping, to the surface at last, the demonic cultivator had thankfully vanished from sight and sense, but that offered little comfort. "She will have felt you, if only for a moment," Liao knew.

"Standard search patterns, from the air, inscribe a spiral form outward from the source," Sayaana launched this warning across Liao's skull bones even as they rose up through the twilight zone. "She was behind us, but eventually she'll be in front."

"They must have found the disrupted formation," Liao offered these words aloud as explanation to the water cultivator. Even as he exchanged these words with his companion at the surface and sucked in air to fill tired lungs, he continued to swim northwest. No time could be wasted now. "The others, we might evade them until they grew bored." None of his brief glimpses of Snow Feast suggested a notably patient hunting technique. "But she will pursue until something is found."

"She cannot find you," Amami Yoko offered herself as a sacrifice without hesitation. "Go on, if you must. I imperil us both."

It would be an easy choice, and was, therefore, too easy. Staring at Amami Yoko, at the tanned and fearsome woman who had already fought beside him twice, Liao rejected that as the coward's path. He would not abandon her, not until the last moment when no other choices remained. A traveler, a guide, did not leave their own behind upon the trail simply because the weather turned. His dao would not allow him to walk that callous path.

Yet, at the same time the warrior's willingness to sacrifice herself offered up a renewed source of inspiration, one that recalled the last time he'd seen the resources of the ocean used to face a demonic cultivator. "Scoria Scorn is searching for you, not me," he reasoned. The demonic cultivator had seen the water cultivator slip past her once before, but she had no reason to suspect even his existence, nor his presence. "She is careful. She will keep going until she finds something. We need to give her what she wants, not you, but your remains."

Dark eyes widened at the center of the heart-shaped face. "Is that possible?" A simple, but formidable objection, one Liao could not overcome fully, not yet. He needed, he recognized, time to think through all possibilities, to consider every potential option as Grand Elder Itinay might.

"Dive," he answered instead. "We can hide and search for answers at the same time."

They dove, plunging down into the black, into a world of strange blue flashes and bizarre shapes tied to equally strange sources of qi. Liao's mind did not focus on the descent. Instead, the totality of his intellect focused on a singular problem, the means to generate a false corpse that would fool the senses of a demonic cultivator.

Blood, he knew, was the starting point. It retained vital qi. Other bodily substances did so as well, some for longer. Water, regrettably, would disperse these things. A wound would not show signs of death; it would simply create a trail for the enemy to follow. They needed, he realized, some way to package together pieces of her in order to lure the searching pursuit away while at the same time offering up convincing evidence that Amami Yoko had perished.

Darkness offered no ideas. Neither he nor Sayaana, though they batted about a thousand possibilities, came up with any grand scheme that might serve. The remnant soul upon his brow has survived incidents of this nature by outrunning her hunters. Simple and effective, but utterly unavailable to those in the awareness integration realm. Only an immortal could outrun another immortal.

Lacking inspiration, Liao focused instead on keeping pace with the rapidly swimming woman in front of him. With her advanced movement technique in water and higher cultivation, she was simply faster in all ways, whether in endurance or sprints. Liao, knowing he was holding her back, could only give his utmost effort. In this way, pushing onward at the source of watery qi in front of his senses, he lost track of much of his surroundings as their lungs burned and they rose back towards the surface.

Reading qi in the depths of the ocean was difficult. There was life on all sides in countless sizes and shapes, ranging from massive whales to tiny squid. There were even gelatinous creatures, almost totally invisible until swimming through them, the size of houses. Pushing hard, muscles hot and lungs aflame, Liao had largely ceased to pay attention to the fluid swarm of qi signatures surrounding his course.

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He did not notice the shark until the shadow passed over his head, barely two meters above his scalp. "Impressive," Sayaana's voice whispered into his mind as she, using their shared senses, resolved the creature's presence first.

The animal was huge, a massive mature female nearly five meters in length and perhaps close to fifteen hundred kilos in mass. Her robust white-bellied frame rolled through the waves with a casual grace that utterly belied her bulk. Wide fins allowed the mighty predator to cut through the water with gentle, relaxed motions of the broad tail. The underslung mouth was filled with broad, triangular teeth, the largest of which were almost the length of Liao's thumb.

A white shark, the largest of the many forms of that numerous predatory breed. Liao knew them well, for their thick hide with its pebbly, rough surface made for ideal swordguards and climbing gloves. He had taken a few before, but always from rafts or the shore, never in the open water. Even strong as he now was, he had no desire to challenge such power and grace within its element.

Thankfully, these great predators were uninterested in much beyond the seals that formed the foundation of their rich diet. Whatever the white shark thought he was, it was not food, leaving no reason to clash with such a formidable beast.

Liao naturally assumed that his companion, being born to the ocean, knew this as well. It struck him as a complete surprise when Amami Yoko spun sinuously in the midwaters and chased after the white shark at full speed.

Blessed with senses that, in the ocean, could match that of a skilled disciple, the shark was fully aware of this approach. She did not, however, respond in any way behind rising up slowly toward the surface. Well over two thousand years without any humans anywhere in the wild had left most animals naïve to the dangers of strangely shaped hairless bipeds. Liao knew it well, having exploited the trait many times. In this case, the shark clearly expected to easily outpace the awkwardly flailing creatures that rose up behind her.

Faced with ordinary mortals, that would have been completely correct, but cultivators were not so easily shaken off. Instead, both disciples breached the surface within ten meters of the swift-surging dorsal fin. "There!" Amami Yoko called out the moment she broke free of the waves. "That's it! Sharks eat slow. We can place the lure in her stomach and let her carry it away."

Mad as the idea sounded, a second's thought revealed it to be genius. Liao did not doubt the declaration in the least. He'd cut open small sharks and found fish that must have been eaten many days earlier still nearly whole inside their stomachs. Qi would be preserved for some time, and the white shark, being highly mobile, would carry the signal safely in some other direction. The mighty female was also sufficiently formidable that the possibility of her consuming a wounded and exhausted cultivator was perfectly plausible.

It was an absolutely brilliant idea, aside from the small difficulty of placing every piece of herself Amami Yoko could spare inside of a shark's stomach without having her completely consumed.

"How?" Liao called out as they chopped through the waves. He could imagine grabbing hold of the shark, but with nothing solid to stand upon, that would simply mean being taken for a ride.

"Get under her," the warrior called out with eyes full of fire. "Punch beneath the gills. I can wedge her mouth open with my swords." Without waiting, she surged forward, forcing Liao to race ahead using all the strength he could push into his limbs in order to catch the fleeing shark.

She was remarkably agile for such a massive animal. It took three tries, circling and spinning through the water with motion enhanced using a few flickers of the Stellar Flash Steps, to get beneath the beast. This thoroughly exhausted the shark's patience, and the jaws snapped and chomped as she swirled about, seeking the flesh of the little pest that dared to torment her.

From below, a single strike sufficed, one heavy fist launched into the broad white flesh at the base of the gills. Liao angled his knuckles to avoid slicing his skin open on the tiny toothy razors that covered the shark's hide. Heavy, fat-filled tissue bucked and shifted at his blow, bruising brutally in response to this powerful smash. The jaws distended in reflexive pain as the massive body thrashed in silent torment.

In that same moment the blue-clad warrior spun through the water, counter-spinning in response to the shark's motions. Taking advantage of pain and shock, she shoved both blades, now wrapped up carefully in improvised sheathes of linen, between bone-crushing jaws that could snap a dolphin in half and locked them into place against the gums. The shark raged and thrashed mightily. The waves of pressure unleashed by her motion hurled Liao down into the blue, forcing him to swim hard back up.

He caught up moments later to find Amami Yoko perched between the devastating jaws. She stood with toes wedged between knife-sharp teeth, looking like a sea spirit unleashed. Reaching out as Liao approached, she grabbed him and pulled him to her side.

A forceful exertion of qi, the shaped and deftly wedged expression of the water cultivator's movement technique, held the paired cultivators together and in place even as the affronted shark carried them on a rampage below, through, and even above the waves. Water buffeted their backs, and they scraped past crabs, snails, and squid as the raging white shark expressed her wrath, but with qi to protect them such blows were nothing and their vastly strengthened lungs held against the rigor of prolonged submersion.

Though the shark's fury proceeded unabated, she could neither crush the artifact blades forged out of the heart of deep submarine mountains nor shake free the cultivators clinging to her jaws like remoras.

Amami Yoko, wrapped around by fingers and toes to the teeth and gums, stared pointedly at Liao's daggers. It was a clear direction that the next duty, grim and bitter, fell into his hands. With her efforts devoted entirely to holding them fast, he would have to do the work needed to place a facsimile of a corpse into the mighty stomach of the white shark.

Not a task he relished, and the trust it invested in him, that the refugee cultivator would allow him to commit to such vile surgery, was almost as terrifying as the work at hand was destined to be gruesome.

Liao cut her clothes away first, leaving Amami Yoko naked save for her sword belt. He used ragged cuts, leaving a pattern of marks on the shredded garments that resembled the damage the triangular teeth would inflict. Hair followed with the next severing. He sliced away the long ponytail and then shaved off the scalp until it was bare and pink as a newborn babe's. The black mat of stringy strands that filled the gullet would, he knew, persist and block, making digestion of what came next even slower than otherwise.

Closing his eyes, feeling by qi alone, he took the next step. Vision, hearing, even his balance, these were nothing more than distractions when slammed against the jaws of a thrashing shark while plowing through the ocean. The absolute focus available to a world viewed only according to the truth of revealed qi, with all other perceptions removed, was a trick of integrated awareness wielded deliberately he desperately relied upon now.

With great care, he moved his dagger along the edge of Amami Yoko's calf and sliced open a vein. Blood poured into the shark's mouth, thick with its distinctive iron tang and the ocean born cultivator's own potential qi. Liao let this flow proceed only until he felt the warrior's qi begin to diminish as a consequence of blood loss. Then, sealing the injury with a press of his thumb and an infusion of his own qi, he took the next step.

He carved thin strips of skin and muscle off the back of the legs. Nothing that would impair. Nothing that would not heal in time. These too were fed to the shark, as were the toenails and tiny flakes of bone carved off the shins and pelvis. It required exquisitely careful manipulation, this delicate butchery. Never in his life had Liao been so grateful for his extremely sharp knives or his long practice dressing animals as he was in that moment.

When it was done, he wrenched free the wavering Amami Yoko and used both sealed swords to slam the shark hard across the snout. The beast retreated into the depths, carrying the evidence far away. Liao grasped the warrior in a carry hold and continued to swim north until her wounds closed and the flesh began to grow back. Then, knowing that a demonic cultivator remained in pursuit, they dove again.

The water cultivator made no comment on this bizarre, enforced donation. She offered neither complaint nor praise.

The only assessment Liao would ever receive regarding this horrid method of deception was equally based on absence. As they continued northeast, Scoria Scorn did not reappear in the skies.