The Elder confined him to his cell for three days after his “shocking display” at the dinner table. He was, however, allowed to keep the hunk of meat.Tian had guessed the Elder’s intention correctly. If that didn’t get the message across to his sect siblings, he really didn’t know what would. Three days of closed door cultivation for an immortality cultivating daoist didn’t even qualify as a rap on the knuckles.
While he was confined, Tian reflected on the first dinner he had at the Temple. The most incredible food he had ever seen, all laid out in front of him on the table. But he didn’t know how to hold chopsticks or even how to use a spoon. And what if all these huge people stole his food? What if they stole his food?!
The brothers had shown him how to hold a spoon. When he looked back, his bowl was magically full. It stayed full until he was groaning from eating too much. It was one of his most precious memories.
Tian hadn’t really intended to threaten to chew out the Elder’s throat. Upon reflection, he decided he meant every word. You didn’t screw with someone’s dinner. You just didn’t.
Tian’s journey through Level Six was terrifyingly fast. He had noticed an increase in cultivation speed ever since the events at Burning Flag City, and while there was no substitute for time, the improvements in his mentality seemed to be helping a great deal as well. Elder Rui might have been wrong on a lot of things, but he wasn’t wrong about how good this trip would be for Tian and Hong. Nor how healing.
Maddening, frustrating, sometimes despairing, but healing nonetheless. Just being out of the wasteland, out of the slaughter, but still with people who had been there. Who got it, and got him. It did so much.
Tian had been slowly exploring his sect siblings. Brother Wang was loud, boldly declaring his ‘truths’ and ‘unafraid to take all comers in debate.’ But there was simply no getting him to talk about himself. Not even his life in the sect. Tian quickly felt out the edges of that dark territory. Brother Wang would only reveal bad things about himself, and even then he directed people’s attention back to the accusation of heresy. For anyone else, it would be a damning brand and effectively a death sentence. For Brother Wang, it was a cloak. Who would bother looking under such a heinous accusation? What more was there to learn about the man?
There was one of the finest minds Tian had yet encountered. That was worth discovering. Brother Wang tended to slam down ideas, making the tea table shake with them. “No organization constructed as an Immortal Cultivation Sect can be truly moral.” That sparked a hell of an argument! “The cultivation of immortality either severs the cultivator from humanity, or humanity as a whole has fallen into an unnatural condition.” That was another big fight. But then the supporting arguments and evidence would start rolling out.
“To pursue the dao is to pursue a life in accordance with nature. This requires us to shake off mortal ways of thinking, mortal ambitions, mortal desires, to simplify our thoughts and live more like the animals. Animals who, we know, are better at cultivating than we are, at least in the Earthly Realm. So, then, what could humanity be but a fallen species of animal? We must be closer to demons than apes, because we do not live in accord with the dao.”
Tian wasn’t quite sure how to rebut that one.
“The nature of any sect is hierarchical, an elder transmitting wisdom to his juniors and receiving their worship in exchange. One can argue this is a form of compassion, and that one can lead with humility. However, is that what we really see in practice? What is the argument worth if it’s not born out by the facts? Every sect is built on the premise that a path to immortality for a select few is worth the suffering of the many. An argument that is inherently arrogant, greedy, and cruel, as it is always repeated most loudly by those at the top of the hierarchy. And those who oppose it are labeled heretics.”
“But without sects, who would stop heretical cultivators? And since wild animals are better natural cultivators than humans, it would only take a single hawk or tiger to exterminate entire cities of mortals. Some threats need orthodox cultivators to deal with, even if they don’t live up to the morality they preach.” Tian argued.
“How many of those threats are created by the sects themselves? Remind me again of why we are reading all these scrolls? And I didn’t say cultivation was immoral, far from it. But why couldn’t cultivators live with other humans? Why set one above the other? Is it truly inherent to human nature? Or is it something we have taught ourselves to do?”
Tian started looking for patterns in his arguments, and quickly found them. He felt like he was tracking a diagnosis through his textbooks, watching symptoms and causes jump from page to page, the whole disease only emerging when everything was assembled in front of him.
Brother Wang distrusted hierarchy. He chafed at having others set above him, not because he thought he was better but because he thought those people were dangerous. There was enormous compassion in him. All his arguments had the unspoken, foundational premise that every life was valuable and worth preserving. That life was not simply to be endured, but lived. Lived richly and fully and joyfully.
Other details emerged when looked at with the right focus. His profound unwillingness to stand out was a form of hiding, of course, but it was also a form of modesty. He phrased it as “not wanting to play the leading man,” or that he “preferred to be underestimated.” Tian’s brothers often mentioned “Playing the pig to eat the tiger,” which was one of the more incomprehensible metaphors Tian had ever heard. It made more sense once he got to know Brother Wang.
Brother Wang was loud, to hide all the thoughts he kept inside. He wore his shame openly, to hide his virtue. He leaned into the fact that he was big and ran to fat, to better fade into the background. To let others play the leading role as he stood in the chorus. Tian was quietly surprised to see that he and sister Liren got along splendidly. She was always happy to be charging out in front, and Brother Wang was always ready to cheer her on.
The reverse was sadly true for Brother Wang and Sister Su. The two could hardly sit in the same room without blowing up at each other. They would rattle off points, arguments, counter arguments, supporting evidence, impeaching evidence, back and forth, for hours. Never descending into the realm of personal attacks, but furiously and relentlessly debating on almost every other ground.
It was entirely in character, Tian thought, that Sister Su would wake up, carefully assemble her ammunition, then go out looking for violence. He once saw her chasing down Brother Wang when it looked like he was going to have an argument-free lunch. She could move that chair fast when she was motivated.
Tian didn’t know what awful things had happened to Brother Wang, but it was definitely something. He had been sent here to heal too. And whatever it was that hurt him left him scared to even hint at what it might have been. He hated the disciplinary squad, though. The only time he really blew up in an argument was when he got into the “virtues” of the squad with Sister Liren.
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Brother Wang thought the disciplinary squad were a bunch of useless, greedy thugs and there was no persuading him otherwise. Tian agreed, but he kept his mouth shut. Sister Liren seemed to agree about the greed and thuggery, but then darkly muttered about the vile crimes she had seen. And that was on comparatively well policed military bases. And Sister Su? She approved of the squad, but only in theory.
“It is necessary that norms and standards are enforced to ensure the orderly operation of any organization. Call them laws or regulations or what you will. The disciplinary squad system has indeed become impossibly corrupt and in need of reformation. But there will always be a need for the squad, or something similar.”
“Reformation is a temporary lessening of the symptoms. The disease is the whole structure of the thing- vague rules enforced harshly and capriciously by people who can only be checked by those above them in the hierarchy… who are exactly the same people using them to commit atrocities in the sect!” Wang slammed his hand on the table hard enough to make it jump into the air.
“So? Should there not be consequences for one’s actions? Once that point is established, we are merely discussing means and methods, not the essential principle of rules, and the rules being enforced by a body dedicated to that purpose.”
“You leap straight to the conclusion- the necessity of some form of squad. But a well designed system, yes with rules, should be self regulating. In the event of a crime of passion, theft or other similar offense, it should be the whole affected community taking action. The local temple, the neighborhood in Mountain Gate City, whatever. And again, in a well structured system, such crimes would be vanishingly rare.”
“Oh, well, as long as the system is ‘well structured,’ then.” Sister Su’s voice was usually close to a monotone. When she chose to make it acidic, it burned. “What a shame no one in the last ten thousand years has managed to structure it well.”
Sister Su’s family died in a famine. It wasn’t a particularly big famine. Some parts of the Kingdom reported record crops that year. But in her part of the kingdom, a significant increase in taxes (payable in rice) combined with a significant shortfall in rain, coming after five years of less-than-ideal rainfall, resulted in farmers with no rice to feed themselves with. In any well run province, the governor would have granted tax relief and imported grain. At the very least, they would have opened the granaries.
The province was not well run. It was an entirely preventable “human disaster.” It wasn’t like millions died either- at most a few thousand did, leaving more stunted from malnutrition. Sister Su’s family died because they were too weak to resist the influenza that came with the autumn rain.
Sister Su said the next year’s yields were back within historical norms. The clinical words hid the pain and bitterness in her voice, blunting the fury in her eyes. It didn’t have to be this way. People didn’t have to keep doing stupid things over and over and over again. There were right ways to do things. Optimal ways. And she was willing to work to find them. Willing to work without food, without rest. Willing to seal herself in libraries, to ignore the mockery of people who didn’t understand her vision, even willing to slow down her cultivation in favor of more time spent researching and testing the solutions she developed.
Nobody ever took her answers seriously. They just checked and made sure her form of crazy wasn’t catching. Sometimes they would say it was too expensive, or too radical, too disruptive, too… so many things that all boiled down to preferring the inefficient and ineffective because change was, for whatever reason, hard.
She hadn’t yet killed anyone over it. That was largely thanks to timely intervention by several senior sisters, and on one occasion, the Chief Librarian.
The Chief Librarian was the only one who properly listened to her. He agreed with her proposal to get as many scriptures into as many hands as possible. He fully endorsed, and even expanded upon, her subversion of the rule restricting certain scriptures to the Inner Court and the Monastery. He supported her new shelving system, once he understood it. He was even willing to let her sleep in the library, in the tiny den of books and shelves she had made for herself in a storage room.
Tian recognized the look in her eyes. He had seen it in his own reflection often enough. Sister Su had found her Senior Brother Fu.
She didn’t know how many demons or heretics she killed during the attack on Depot Four. It didn’t matter. The demon managed to get behind her because she was unwilling to move from her assigned position defending the Scripture Pavilion. The Chief trusted her to protect the east side of the Scripture Pavilion against all threats below the Heavenly Person level. She had not failed his trust. And that was all there was to say about that.
She never mentioned how badly she got hurt. Or how frustrating it was, being confined to a wheelchair for months. Or how she should have been paralyzed from the waist down even if they managed to save her legs from amputation. She did mention, however, with all the pride her cool voice could hold, that the Chief Librarian personally visited her in the hospital and bestowed on her a heavenly medicine.
“Don’t you consider the Chief your patron, then?” Hong asked.
“Certainly not. He’s not doing me favors. He recognizes a capable subordinate and is making appropriate use of me. The fact that everyone else is too stupid and lazy to do their damned jobs is no fault of his or mine. The medicine was recognition of a job well done. Nothing more, and nothing less.”
It wasn’t love, Tian realized. Not in the romantic sense or the familial sense. It was loyalty. Loyalty of a type and ferocity Tian had never seen before. It humbled him.
And then there was Lin. Elder Feng was done waiting for her young charges to make up and get along thanks to being confined in close quarters on the barge. The healing power of team activities were, likewise, found to be insufficient. Lin started getting scrolls to study too, along with pointed instructions to everyone to discuss them.
It didn’t go well. Even with the best will in the world, which there wasn’t, the resentment was too plain. The best they achieved was a chilly sort of tolerance.
And now they were hurtling towards the Five Elements Courtyard, where things would get very messy, and dangerous, and they would be surrounded by predators. Their only hope of survival would be mutual trust and support.
Tian sighed as he sat with his feet in the pond, feeding small bites of fruit to the crane. It hadn’t been too bad, being confined in his cell, but he was coming to hate not being able to see the full sky whenever he wanted to. He thought of those drinking glasses from the caravan he raided. Would it be possible to build a house from glass? To be safe from vermin, but still able to see the whole sky? What a holy wonder that would be!
He kicked up a small spray of water. The Elder’s methods weren’t wrong, exactly. It’s just that they didn’t get to the root cause of things. At least, not where making peace with Lin was concerned. And now, especially with the crane, being able to trust Lin was a highly urgent necessity.
“Elder Feng?” He didn’t bother going to look for her. He knew she heard him. “I’m going to speak with Lin directly. We will be discussing some things that you might prefer not to know about. I won’t if you tell me not to, but this isn’t going to get better otherwise.”
There was no answer. He sighed and stood. The Snow Grace Crane was rapidly losing her remaining brown feathers, turning a brilliant, pure white. Except for her unsettlingly red face, of course. But other than that, she was becoming quite beautiful. The very tips of her wings, with their long, trailing feathers, were black. A tiny splash of contrast to bring the whole into better focus.
He found Lin’s room and knocked. A few moments passed, and she opened the door. He cupped his hands.
“I was wondering if Sister Lin had time to join me for a cup of tea?”