Unseen Cultivator

"There is a difference, in battle, between the trivial and the easy. One is simply the sort of basic task that anyone who properly walks the path of immortality treats as a test of their diligence. The other is something that requires the exertion of the entirety of your effort. Treating something easy as if it is trivial will eventually get you killed. After all, how often do we fail to accomplish easy things?"

This warning had come from Grand Elder Artemay. Only now, as he carried Amami Yoko across the Sunfire Islands, did Qing Liao fully appreciate its import. Killing a ghoul, from a distance, while undetected, was trivial. It was something he did while wandering, periodically, whenever a good opportunity arose. Thinning out the local ghouls made gathering easier, and destroying such mindless monsters was similar to how a farmer, surveying fields prior to planting, would nevertheless pull any weeds that intersected his strides. A proper thing to do, but one that required hardly any thought or effort.

Killing the ghouls while protecting his new companion was considerably more challenging. It was still easy enough; his storage bracelets held several hundred arrows all told and he could recover most of those he used. He faced no need to spare ammunition. However, the risks had multiplied considerably.

Exhaustion was one. Carrying the other cultivator at speed across rough terrain was simple enough, but it wore him down over time. Especially as he dared not stop or take any break lasting longer than an hour. The periodic need to fight, to blast through a clump of ghouls that grew too close or simply congregated along a bend in the river because they'd been swept there by years of seasonal flooding – a distressingly common occurrence – drew down his reserves. He had to manage his exertions of qi with great care or risk being reduced to the same depleted state as the woman on his back.

The second difficulty was the need to defend his new charge, both from the demons and her own nearly suicidal desire to attack them. Though initially restrained by severe weakness, the further they moved down the river and the closer to proper human strength she recovered the more severe the problem grew. By the time they reached the lower reaches of the river she had regained potency sufficient to match a low-layer body refining realm cultivator. This, combined with the potent cutting power of her twin swords, meant she could defeat ghouls one-to-one. The moment she realized this, she dared to charge them.

Demons, of course, were not so simple, and they responded to such attacks by swarming toward their prey. The red bodies soon surrounded the weakened water cultivator past all ability of her fluid movement technique to escape.

Three times in as many days Liao was forced to strike through these mobbings using a barrage of qi arrows, a tactic he knew he could not continue indefinitely. Short breaks restored much, the Celestial Induction Method proved its efficacy beyond any doubt in those few days along the river, but it was not enough.

After the third incident, his patience, heavily frayed, snapped at last. "Are you trying to kill yourself?" He snarled at Amami Yoko, tilting his head backward as he bounded away from their latest confrontation. "Because there are far more direct methods."

"I am not," the answer was given with almost disturbing frankness, the sort of cold clarity that made it clear she had contemplated that option on a level Liao rejected intrinsically. "I have a duty to the Great Waves Sect that forbids my death until proper vengeance is carried out. But," she shook her head, and looked out into the forest as they ran. "Vengeance is fighting with my dao for mastery. The demons, every time I see them, it is as if the world turns red. I fall back into the fighting style I was taught, the Fountain Water Sword, without thinking, without remembering I stand on solid ground."

She did not elaborate, so Liao did not immediately understand this explanation. Sayaana, however, had once been fully capable of flight, a being to who air and water functioned in much the same manner. "If she could move up or down, such small numbers of demons would never pin her," the remnant soul sighed. "It takes time to learn to fly. I suspect, when you always swim, it takes time to learn to walk again.

The meaning made clear, Liao amended his remarks accordingly. "We can work on battle tactics later, for now, avoid attacking at all. It is better if I handle things from a distance." The demons could be counted on to charge the water cultivator as soon as they could see her. That made their motions predictable and turned arranging their deaths from easy back to trivial.

"If that is your order," Amami Yoko replied with deadpan serious intonation. Not mockery, simply the words of one who had crushed her emotions as far down as they could go.

"It is," Liao winced. He did not like giving out commands in this way. Seven years of service, a matter to take very seriously indeed. Even three days of moving about, mostly while carrying her, had made it clear that the water cultivator expected her superior to act absolutely. She would obey, utterly and without question. In the absence of explicit commands, she would disregard commentary and suggestion and instead follow her own instincts.

Barking out such direct commands, taking obvious advantage of the vow of service, made Liao feel as if he was speaking to a child or a raw recruit, not a woman a mere twenty-four years younger than he himself was.

Her age had been something of a surprise, the casual announcement that this foreigner outpaced his own cultivation and, indeed, nearly matched that of Zhou Hua – the sole prodigy he knew. Such achievements were exceedingly rare, even within the Celestial Origin Sect. Sayaana, once again, possessed the proper context to provide a ready answer to such puzzles. "In small lands, only prodigies advance."

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

A likely true statement, one easy enough to reverse engineer, but that offered little comfort. All such words truly did was confirm that Liao, though capable as a cultivator, was not a prodigy. Excellent, perhaps, superior to most of his peers, but not, never, the best.

That was, he feared, not enough. To do all he dreamed, all that had been asked of him, he needed to reach immortality. Few save for prodigies breached that barrier.

Rather than lose himself in such ruminations, Liao focused his thoughts on Amami Yoko instead. A woman from a space beneath the sea. He had countless questions but pushed them off his tongue. It was not the time. They were still on the run and he did not wish to hear the tale of the Nine Peaks Range while carrying its last survivor on his back. Some things were too disrespectful to contemplate. Courtesy and decency alike demanded that he restrain his curiosity.

Instead, returning his thoughts to the practical, he elaborated on the initial command. "It is better if you avoid fighting, for now. Those swords are excellent weapons, but as you are they drain your qi with each strike." They would do so even at her full strength, the price any cultivator paid for wielding artifacts meant for the use of one with a higher realm core. Extreme exertion was demanded to cross that barrier. However, once restored to awareness integration realm capacity the loss would be merely draining, not overwhelming as it was now. "Killing random demons accomplishes nothing. It is better to simply avoid them."

"How can that be true?" Amami Yoko's eyes instantly burst full of salty tears. "You have the power to slaughter them all day long. How can you let the enemy live when they are exposed, helpless, before you? The tuna does not ignore the sardine."

Liao's familiarity with tuna did not extend beyond drawings, but while hunting for sharks he had seen those mighty predators charge through great congregations of feed fish. The metaphor took a moment to puzzle out, but it was not impossible to follow. Or to extend. "A single fish cannot consume the entire school." He looked back at her and forced his voice to be hard. Cladding his manner in imitation of Itinay's icy fire, the grimmest expression of harsh truths he knew, helped. "Once, there were one billion demons. Now, perhaps one third of those remain, perhaps as few as one fourth. Yet that legion still numbers in the hundreds of millions. I could kill one hundred ghouls every day for years and barely make an impact against the total. The world itself already slaughters them far faster than my arrows ever could."

"The world kills them?" Amami Yoko held many mysteries, but she clearly understood simple arithmetic. "How? I was taught they are immortal, and they feel so. They do not need to breathe or eat. I have seen this. They walk upon the bottom of the sea, tireless. No beast, not even the greatest of whales, ever attacks them." She shook her head sharply. "Only weapons can kill them."

"No," Liao replied with his own negating shake. Then, struck by a sudden inspiration, paused and changed the intended course of his remarks. "Or rather, the world, from stone to soil, has weapons of its own. A wave can strike with force to match, or even exceed, a mace, and both can crush the skull of a ghoul. I have seen it." Without even realizing it, he mimicked her manner of declarative assertion. "I watched as a great flood swept the land, and hundreds of thousands of demons were dashed to death against the hard stones of cliffs." He did not say he'd engineered that discharge. That would be both conceited and unlikely to be believed. Building rapport mattered more than the full truth, for now.

"Disasters cannot kill enough, not hundreds every day," the warrior from below the waves rejected this possibility out of hand. "Such things are incredibly rare disruptions."

"Under the sea, perhaps," Liao considered the time he had spent underwater accordingly. It had felt rather constant and unchanging. "Not here. Look there," he pointed to a large tree not fifty meters from the river's edge, one with a girth and height that dwarfed all others nearby. "Do you see the black mark that wraps about the trunk?" Knowing that cultivator eyes could not miss this, he left open no gaps in which a question might emerge. "That was left behind by a great fire, one that ripped through these mountains not fifty years ago. Look around, there are few old trees, less than one in a thousand survived that great blaze, and what is true of trees is true of demons. Wildfire rages across every land, in time, spread by lightning and volcanoes. Centuries may pass between burnings, but it has been over twenty-seven centuries since the demon war. Most of the demons have already perished. In time fire, flood, and worse will destroy them all."

Grand Elder Artemay had a formula. It predicted that, without any external intervention, the number of demons would decrease by half every two thousand years. In another ten thousand years the remaining remnant of the once billion-strong world-spanning horde would be piteous indeed.

"To wait then, is that your strategy?" Amami Yoko's warrior hackles rose. Some part of her, buried deep, intrinsically fought against accepting that path.

Such a rebellion could not be permitted. Liao knew offering an explanation, a formula, would fail. So, he did not attempt to. Instead, he launched the obvious but brutal counterblow the water cultivator had inadvertently stepped into. The trap slammed shut atop the hard eyes without mercy. "It was the strategy of your sect leader. Do you deny that?"

He hated the way she looked at him then, the expression of disgust at revealed truth he knew from the mirror so well. "We should move on. There is still a great deal of river to follow."

"I beg one question only." Amami Yoko fell to her knees and bowed formally. "You said previously that killing too many demons would draw the attention of their masters, who we cannot face. This I acknowledge, it is true that those traitors have power we cannot match. But if the demonic cultivators were gone, if the world was filled with demons only. Would you wait or would you hunt them?"

Something buried deep down inside Qing Liao, below the level of thought, wound tight about the core of his dao, tore out an answer before the question was even finished. "Hunt. The plague is a parasite upon the world, and a foreigner that has no place here. I will see it, all of it, perish."

He wondered, long after the ocean-born warrior's smile had faded, if he would ever be equal to that vow.