Tian knew Grandpa Jun loved him. Sometimes, he would feel grandpa embracing him for no reason, or caressing the back of his head, or simply resting his hand against Tian’s back as encouragement or support. And sometimes, he was a malicious old ghost with an evil sense of humor. Who, Tian silently demanded of the universe, who would ever think of posing a puzzle like that just when he was trying to get to sleep?
Grandpa was right. He hadn’t felt the elemental energy move inside the elder. He had felt the attacks the elder launched through the array at the very end, but not whatever was circulating inside the old man. Or the enchantment that was driving the people in the room to madness and exhaustion.
Before today, he would have said only those at the Heavenly Person Realm could evade his detection. It was how he was able to consistently beat people of a higher realm. Training, experience, an astonishingly well cultivated body, but most importantly, he could read their every move before they made it. It was easy to win a lot of fights if you could always hit them but they could never hit you.
It seemed he would have to relearn what it was like to fight using mortal senses. His stomach knotted up. He didn’t feel safe. Even in his little tent, with Liren barely ten feet away, he didn’t feel properly safe.
Tian forced himself to breathe. It wasn’t like he had suddenly lost his power. The Yellow Banner Bandits hadn’t been able to evade his senses. It clearly wasn’t something just anyone could do. Since Ren, the blind musician, had been the disciple of a sect with less than fifty members and a thin inheritance, his advantages had clearly come from somewhere else. Maybe that true oracle, or whoever ‘The Visitor’ was.
Tian had never hunted a heretic emissary before. Maybe now was the time to give it a try. Or maybe not. Chasing around a mountain after a diviner that didn’t want to be found sounded like an amazing waste of time.
He went back and forth, then let the idea go. They had more urgent business.
Draw the air in. Hold it. Slowly exhale. Let your lungs sit empty. Inhale, long and slow. Repeating the cycle as he forced his body to relax, one muscle group at a time.
They had a plan. They would go up the Agate, cross the plains around Golden Field City, get on the eastern fork of the Green river, and ride it down almost all the way to Ancient Crane Mountain. A quick stop, or not so quick stop, at West Town Outer Court to drop off Little Treasure, then on to the Capital. Which was also connected to a navigable river, just not the Green River. They would have to go overland for the last leg of their journey.
The whole trip would take a couple months, most of it spent on water. Less if they stopped trying to play mortal. Not bad at all. It would all work out. Maybe he would have the time to learn how to play the flute. And maybe they would all sprout wings and fly home.
Snorting, Tian dug into his bedroll, blessed the makers of his rat-proof tent for the thousandth time, and fell asleep.
They set off in a curious mood- the mortals grim and depressed, the cultivators chipper. Tian tried to explain, but kept quickly running into the same problem- they were following their dao.
“Virtue and the way.” Tian said out of the blue. “That’s what you aren’t seeing.”
He got strange looks in triplicate. The crane was having a nap on the prow, and wasn’t interested in glaring at him for the moment. Tian had the uncanny feeling that this was the only thing sparing him from being perfectly boxed in by looks.
“We are doing the right things for the right reasons. Yes, horrible things have happened. Horrible things are going to happen. But right now, it’s a beautiful day on a beautiful river, and we are doing the right things for the right reasons. So we are happy.” He waved his hands at the flowing scenery, the fisher birds dipping in and out of the water, the swaying trees, the way the sunlight danced over the bands of tan and purple stone that lined the river.
“That is… quite the immortal view.” Censor Henshen’s cheek twitched. “No concern about the dark clouds on the horizon?” He pointed up. There were, in fact, thunderheads on the edge of the sky. Piling up into anvil clouds and windswept black towers. At the speed summer storms moved, they would probably need to find cover in an hour or less.
“Sure. But I’ve been rained on before.” Tian smiled and leaned back. Then added. “Though, Sis’ Liren, if you see a good spot-”
“Way ahead of you. Do you remember if there are any sects nearby?”
Tian thought for a moment and shook his head. Hong sighed. There weren’t any particularly close villages either.
“There will be a canyon soon. So long as we aren’t trapped in it when the high waters come down, it’s going to be fine. And if we are, we may be able to find an overhang or a ledge or something.” Liren sounded like she was smiling. The time spent persuading her to advance her body cultivation was completely worth it. There was something awful about a fire cultivator who couldn’t feel joy. This was much better.
Liren turned out to be exactly right- there was a canyon, and twenty feet above the river, there was a long ledge under a wide overhang.
“What a shame there is no way to… ah.” Censor Henshen cut himself off as Tian casually grabbed a hold of the canyon wall and stopped the boat dead in the water. Liren leapt upward, making the boat buck for a moment. She grabbed the ledge with one hand and continued her upward momentum with a light push. She landed on both feet on the ledge, barely making a sound.
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“Looks pretty good. A lot of bird droppings and old nests, but that just means it’s a safe place to roost. Here, climb up.” She unrolled a rope ladder that she kept stowed in her ring. It was long enough that the last few rungs piled up in the bottom of the boat.
“Little Treasure up first, then Censor Henshen. I’ll pack the boat and climb up last.” Tian pointed up the ladder.
A quick tidy up, and they had a cozy little campsite just in time to watch the rain come down. The ledge didn’t keep them perfectly dry, but with some rain cloaks, it was entirely good enough. The crane, Tian noticed, seemed to take particular pleasure in kicking the empty nests off the ledge, then dusting with a powerful gust from her wings.
The river quickly turned white, smashing through the canyon. The rock walls shook with the thunder of the waters, kettling the rain and rushing river roar and boiling the humans in the sound.
“I should learn how to swim.” Tian muttered. “I’m not scared of water, but it does kind of make me nervous.”
“But you love being on the boat. I’m starting to worry about ever getting you off the boat.” Hong gave him a side glance.
“Yeah, but I almost drowned when I was a kid. Fell off a cliff, landed in a river, a good time was not had.”
“When was this?”
“Hmm. Treasure, you might find the story interesting too. Sit here next to me.” Tian patted a stretch of rock. Once the little boy was settled in, Tian told the story of the tiger, the Stormborn Truffle, the climb down the cliffside, and the never to be sufficiently damned eagles. He didn’t hide how scary things were, but he also didn’t downplay the sheer joy and satisfaction he felt eating the truffle, and the incredible feeling of collapsing onto the rock at the mouth of the lake.
Liren was laughing by the end of it. Treasure looked at her reproachfully and asked “Does that kind of thing happen often?”
Two teens and an adult started nodding. “Constantly.” Tian said.
“More often than not.” Hong agreed.
“Only if you are a cultivator.” Censor Henshen raised a pale hand. “We have whole reams of policy and jurisprudence, that is, commentary on laws, about how to deal with the strange coincidences that happen to immortals. Mostly we just turn a blind eye, but sometimes the Kingdom’s bureaucracy has to get involved.”
“It’s that common?” Treasure looked like he couldn’t believe it. “I’ve fallen off of things before and never landed on a natural treasure.”
“I got my body cultivation art off a dead heretic.” Tian shrugged.
“Got mine when I put my fist through the side of a solid-looking hill.” Hong volunteered.
“Then there is the bodily reconstruction. Those were mostly happy coincidences paired with hard work, but it’s happened twice in less than a decade.” Tian continued.
“Oh don’t go telling him those lies.” Liren flapped a hand at Tian. “Ignore him. He claims he can dissolve himself and rebuild better in the right conditions. I one hundred percent guarantee you will die if you try it. There is a reason he is a doctor in training and not a doctor.”
Tian sulked. He had never lied about how he had refined his body, but for some insufficiently-explained reason, ‘Tian Soup’ was always deemed impossible by his sectmates.
It was one of the great mysteries of the world to Tian. Grandpa had been right - you did need a special something to cultivate, and it was something orthodox cultivators believed you had to be born with. While there were heretical means to turn an ordinary mortal into a cultivator, they were, definitionally, heretical. Tian was no expert, but his theory was that they all relied on seizing the life and potential of others and using all that energy to transform the body and meridians or dantian or something of the heretic.
The reason you needed to kill so many people was, therefore, that mortals had limited life and potential. That, and the process wasn’t very efficient. Tian had yet to see a heretical art that worked better than an equivalent orthodox one.
The thing was, though, that all this meant that there was a mechanism. Between Tian Soup and heretical cultivation, he could prove that the potential to cultivate immortality could be created after a person was born. What’s more, the sheer number of minor sects and wandering cultivators strongly implied, to him, anyway, that some modest degree of cultivation was more widely possible than the recruitment numbers at the Ancient Crane Monastery would suggest.
Tian had always believed that if you could stand up, hear thunder, see lightning, and cultivate, there was a spot waiting for you in the Outer Court. And only the last point was actually necessary. And yet, they had a recruitment crisis and their overall numbers had dropped frighteningly low. All those kids ringing the Dragon Calling Bell- really none of them could cultivate at all? Or was there a degree of filtering at play? Level Nines were not necessarily common outside Ancient Crane Mountain, and were viewed as real experts by most. The Outer Court had more Level Nines than the other cultivation levels combined.
If he could see it, the Daoist Masters could too. There was a piece he was missing. What it might be, he didn’t know. Tian flicked a pebble off the edge of the cliff and watched it vanish in the rain and roaring waters.
“I really do need to learn how to swim.” He murmured.
“I can teach you.” Hong offered.
“Thank you Sister. I would appreciate that.”
“I want something in trade.”
“Oh? I’ll do what I can but I must warn you, I am very poor. I lost my hospital job, and now I’m a vagrant. I can barely keep clothes on my back. My bird has to hunt her own food, or get by on what I can find on trees-”
Hong pulled out her spear.
“How can I help you, Sister Liren? Who exploits the poor.”
“I want you to teach me first aid. More first aid, I mean. I’m sick of being useless after a battle.”
Tian smiled and nodded. “Happy to.”
Hong put away her spear. “By the way, did you forget that I know to the last brass cash how much money you have? I’ve been doing all our buying and selling for close to five months now.”
“Being broke is a mindset, Sister. If you just apply yourself, you too can live a life of radical poverty. What is gold and silver but worldly dross? Can any jewel or crown match the gem of the dao?” Tian spoke with great conviction.
There was silence on the ledge.
“You got that from that old drunk Starcaller didn’t you?”
“I did, yes. It’s good though.” Two immortals and two mortals watched the rain fall and the floodwaters rise for another hour, then spent the hour after that waiting for the water to settle down again.
“Next stop, Red Adler Town.” Hong cheerfully announced as she picked up the oar. “And, with luck, an inn.”
There were muted cheers.
“Oh come on, they can’t all be death traps!” She laughed.