Brother Fu stood rooted on the ground, his voice a rolling chant. Each word landed like a graven tablet, like a bronze stele carrying the supreme law.
“The things of the world burst out everywhere, and each returns to its own root. Returning to the root is called stillness; this is called returning to destiny; returning to destiny is called constant; knowing the constant is called enlightenment.”
The sky convulsed. The dragon palm ripped apart the clouds and fell into self destruction in a tangle with the stores of lightning that remained above. Fu’s voice throbbed and dug into the ears of everyone still in earshot. Tian recognized what was happening. It was dao charm, the same as what he and Hong left the Six Turns Cavern with. Brother Fu was just carrying a lot more than they had.
“Not knowing the constant one acts blindly and ill-omened. Knowing the constant one can accommodate; accommodation leads to impartiality; impartiality leads to kingliness; kingliness leads to the heavens; the heavens lead to the Dao.”
The air shook. Tian could hear trilling songbirds and the bone shuddering ring of ancient temple bells.
“With the Dao one may endure, and to the end of life one will not be in danger.”
The sky ripped apart. The clouds fled, the lighting faded as though it was ashamed. The starlight gathered and descended on Brother Fu, anointing him and lifting him up. He was lost in them, seeing… something. Seeing that revelation that had eluded him for two hundred years. His own personal understanding of immortality.
The starlight drifted over the base and condensed in a small area around Brother Fu. Tian felt the motes of light enter him and heal the damage done by the lighting. Then they healed the damage done by the battle. The Hell Suppressing Sutra found something it recognized, and started running, incorporating the blessings into him. He looked over at Hong. She was lost in shock. Not that he could blame her. But as the big brother, it was his duty to remind her.
“Cultivate. This is an opportunity.”
He followed his words with action, The Advent of Spring uncoiling within him and reaching up for the light. There were so many things to think about and remember, but one thing he would never, ever forget.
When everyone else ran and his father faced the wrath of a mad god alone, Hong stood with him. She didn’t run. Heavenly People did. The Elder did. The Direct Disciple ran too. Hong didn’t. He etched that into his bones, right beside his father’s love and his brothers’ endless care.
People rushed into the empty space around Brother Fu. Tian recognized the doctors from the hospital- no amount of heavenly healing was going to stop Doctor Pei and Brother Wong looking like death warmed over. Others quickly joined. Martial Aunts and Uncles gathered around Brother Fu. Tian saw the gathered cultivators looking longingly at him… and then they turned around.
Tian seared the scene into his mind. It was a moment where the heavens descended and the dao blessed an ancient mortal and the accepted truth of the world was overturned and they turned around. They put their back to Brother Fu and drew their weapons. Doctors and quartermasters and administrators and monsters of the battlefield, they drew arms and stared into the darkness. Ready to die to protect Brother Fu in his moment of transcendence.
It was too big. Too much. Tian had seen so much cruelty, so much disregard, so much callous calculation by the Monastery. They had said the base was safe, that the battlefield was elsewhere. How many died because they were so wrong? How many were deemed acceptable losses, their deaths not in vain so long as Eunuch Hei died? But for Brother Fu, they turned their back on the chance for their own enlightenment and stood guard.
What was he supposed to do? What was he supposed to feel? Right now, how was he supposed to feel?!
Two hundred years of accumulation for a single moment of brilliance. The light dimmed, and the stars dispersed back to their heavenly courses. Brother Fu descended to the earth, still white bearded and soft eyed but no longer frail. He stood like an ancient pine, straight and tall after endless winters. His eyes flashed as he looked around the shattered Depot. What he was seeing, what he was looking for, who could guess?
“TIAN ZIHAO drag your carcass over here at once! Unfilial beast! No son of mine is going to use that kind of language in public, and NEVER to a senior. Not once in all my years have I seen something so disgraceful! Let’s just see if these old bones can’t teach you about dignity and propriety!”
The next few days were utter chaos. Many people gave Tian iron-clad orders. He was told to stay put in the base and not move an inch. To leave the barracks at once, and camp out at the Hospital. To go back to the barracks. To depart at once for the Inner Sect, or certain remote temples. He was to never leave Hong’s side, and coldly informed that he would not see her again for decades at least. He politely nodded at everything, agreed to anything, and did nothing.
Nobody knew a single damn thing about what was going on, elders included, and none of these people were, so far as Tian knew, in any position to order him to do anything. So he stayed put in the base, and did his best to hide out next to Elder Rui. He no longer considered the Elder reliable, but as his patron, Rui had an interest in keeping Tian alive.
What was more alarming was the number of people who wanted Tian and Hong anywhere but near Elder Rui and the newly elevated Martial Uncle Fu. Especially since Martial Uncle Fu was going to become Direct Disciple Fu as soon as one of the Daoist Masters could be shifted over from the Monastery to collect him.
Tian knew it was all about politics and he could make some guesses as to what the problem was, but since this outcome was apparently the optimal outcome the Monastery was hoping for… why was everyone acting like fools?
Tian went around, checking up on who made it through the battle and who didn’t. Brother Su had been out of the base, as had Senior Sister Bai. Brother Three Nights Hwang, who had taught him so much about his perception arts, hadn’t made it through the battle. His body was pulled out from under a mound of demon corpses. Even in death, his hatchets never left his hands.
Brother Wong had been in the Hospital and lived, but had overdrawn his vital energy and would need at least nine months to recover. The damage to his meridians might never completely heal. Tian was sure they would. That heavenly light seemed able to fix anything. He kept his mouth firmly shut. The wounds were deemed so serious, Brother Wong was being sent back to West Town to recuperate. Auntie Wu was flying back with him. Tian couldn’t get a straight answer about what happened, and he wasn’t allowed to see her. She would live, he was told, and that was better than some.
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Doctor Pei lived, but picked up some new scars when the hospital's wards collapsed. They turned his austere face hideous, puckering his cheeks and twisting his lips. He didn’t slap the junior who offered him highest quality wound paste to make the scars vanish. Reports said he stopped his hand an inch from the idiot’s face and said “To waste good medicine on a scratch is disgusting when so many brothers and sisters fight for their lives. You don’t have a doctor’s heart. Leave and never return, lest I dirty my hand by touching something unclean.”
Brother Zhang from the Mission Office was found on the defensive line in three pieces. He had been kind to Tian, in his manner. A bureaucrat, but a brother nonetheless. When the defensive array fell, he ran to the battle, not from it. Brother Zhang had done Tian much kindness keeping Sima away from him, refusing Tian’s small gifts but still steering the older man towards valuable missions requiring long journeys.
Sima had been in the base during the attack. Tian stood over his body. The talisman pasted to his forehead was so bright, it seemed to burn Tian’s eyes. All that fear. All that focus and wrestling with the morality of murdering a brother. Disgust over the foolishness of their feud, and disgust with his own determination to end the feud with bloody blades… all worthless. All nonsense. In the end, the Wasteland took Sima. He didn’t go quietly. There were two heretics dead before him, and all his wounds were on his front.
For a while, Tian had wondered if Sima had been an accomplice to the infiltrators. Maybe he was an accomplice to whoever launched this raid. In the end, did it matter? The man had been a small minded, greedy prick. He died well, if that was really a thing. Tian didn’t really believe in a good death anymore, though he certainly believed there were bad ones.
The elegant and gentle Brother Long wouldn’t see Tian, nor would he explain why. He screamed through his cell door for Tian to leave him alone, to go away. Tian did. The stink from inside the room hammered at his nose, and the refined young man sounded like a wounded animal.
Sister Li was deep in her wine, and said that there was no crafting that could cure cowardice. She lifted the heavy jugs of strong spirits with one hand. The other arm was gone at the shoulder. Prosthetics could be made, of course, but for a crafter, her path may well have ended. Except, there was the example of Brother Fu.
Tian’s brothers had been right. It would be decades, perhaps centuries, until the Temple was full again. The war had devastated the West Town Outer Court. Devastated all the Outer Court disciples in Depot Four, and they were a key stronghold for the sect. It was a lot of the total strength of Ancient Crane Mountain. He thought they would be heartbroken. They weren’t.
The Level Ten’s had a fire in their eyes. Their steps were crisp and sharp, if erratic. You would see a senior brother break down laughing and weeping for seemingly no reason in the middle of a conversation. Others took the practice fields, driving their bodies to their utmost limits and beyond. The queue outside the Scripture Pavilion was so long, the Disciplinary Squad had to permanently detail people to maintain order.
Sister Su sat on the roof overlooking the door, a dumpster sized bin of red earth next to her and a long lancet set on a nearby table. She spent every day keeping an eye on the visitors and replacing her dart stockpiles. She had a lot to replace. There had been reefs and bullwarks of dead demons and heretics along the east wall of the Pavilion. The killing aura on her was so thick, even the most boisterous cultivators grew quiet as they entered the library.
She needed to sit. A demon ripped open her guts and nearly cut away her legs. She would walk again, but it would take a long time. She didn’t look upset about it. There was madness in her eyes as well, as darts were formed with mechanical precision and stored in her rings.
An old man, a true ancient, far past any hope of ascending to the Heavenly Person Realm, had broken through. And not just any breakthrough, he had received a divine revelation. He captured a piece of the Dao within him and ascended to the heavens with a single step. The earthly had slain the heavenly and shattered heaven’s punishment.
Hope had tortured the Level Ten’s for decades. Everyone hoped for a miracle, but so many grew bitter and cruel because they didn’t really believe they would find one. But then there was Fu. The old certainties crumbled away. That hope which had seemed so mocking and humiliating was now tangible. It walked around the base and sat in the dining hall.
Tian now had a reputation for both kindness and being impossibly foul-mouthed, but he found he could bear it comfortably enough. The father of his heart had acknowledged him publicly, and everyone else went along with it. He was willing to never speak another courteous word if that’s what it took. It didn’t come to that, of course. He had knelt in the rubble and listened attentively to his lecture, tears streaming down his face and smiling so wide he thought his mouth would tear at the corners.
One bit of inescapable oddness was that Tian was sat down, repeatedly, with senior brothers and sisters he either knew from the hospital or were introduced by the doctors there. They were very interested in talking with him, about him, and only about him. They weren’t interested in his arts, except how he visualized them and how they made him feel. They asked him about how he treated bright lights, sudden noises, his willingness to sit with the dying and his very visible un-willingness to engage in the sort of networking and relationship climbing that was the hallmark of life in the sect.
They kept asking what ambitions he had within the sect. Direct Disciple? Daoist Master? Sect Leader? A doctor or an elder? A border guarding general, or a teacher to the generations to come? What did he want to be?
It rapidly got to the point where Tian answered only in monosyllables, or politely referred his interrogators to his other interrogators. He flat out refused to believe that they were there to help him, as they claimed. If they were, he would have asked for them. And he hadn’t.
He wasn’t dumb enough to tell the truth. Tian wasn’t even sure he still wanted to be part of the Monastery. Not after all this. He just didn’t know what else he could be, or where else he could go. Everyone he cared about was here, but he couldn’t stand watching them suffer any longer. His heart was breaking. The last battle had near-crippled him too, even if there was hardly a scratch on him.
It all took about a month to shake out, at least on the Monastery side of things. Tian had noticed patrols were staying very close in, and the supplies being shipped in for rebuilding had stopped for almost an entire week. The Disciplinary Squad was keeping very busy cracking down on even minor infractions, and there was a semi-official ban on gatherings of more than four people at a time for non-sect business.
In a depot with fixed mealtimes and highly limited entertainment, it was practically a policy designed to fail. Another thing that didn’t improve Tian’s sense of calm. He could understand why someone might make that decision, though. The Level Tens were getting increasingly out of hand. It wasn’t just the sudden presence of hope. It was what Bother Fu had preached, and what he taught when anyone asked him about his revelation.
Brother Fu’s Dao was rooted in what the Ancient Crane Monastery taught, but was substantially different in practice. It was fine preaching about living an austere life of nigh-universal compassion to earn power, but what happens when you find someone who really did it? On the other hand, the Elders couldn’t just assign Brother Fu to somewhere remote or hide him away in the Monastery. In a few centuries, he might well be running the Monastery. And while some might entertain darker ideas, who wanted to be the first person to test a man who could bare handedly defeat heavenly lightning? One way or another, Brother Fu’s ideas would spread through the sect.
Thirty-two days after Brother Fu’s ascension, they were all called together to find out how the Monastery intended to manage things.