There was no room at the inn. Tian gave the innkeeper a pregnant look. He knew perfectly damn well there were open rooms.
“Best I can do for you is let you sleep in the old goat shed. Three silver a night, no arguing! You are lucky I’m letting you stay here at all, looking like that.”
Tian shrugged. “If a tall woman wearing a veil comes looking for me, tell her I’m staying at the abandoned shrine outside of town. She’ll tip you.”
The innkeeper sniffed. “It will suit you well. All our derelicts and madmen seem to wash up there.”
Tian nodded. It fit his mood perfectly.
The town was a village with pretensions. The Green River was a major waterway, and there was always someone dreaming of turning their inherited shack into a golden palace through the alchemy of real estate speculation. This was an ordinary village with no particularly redeeming qualities, no better or worse than the next village. But they had gone to the expense of persuading the local prefect and the provincial civil service to grant it the status of a town, so it was better than the rest of the riverside shack-huddles.
As he walked out of the village, the street made a small detour around one of the most spectacularly ugly trees Tian had ever seen. Its branches were twisted like rope, with axe destroying knots and elbows visible everywhere. What was worse was that, despite the tree being big enough to shade a herd of cattle, you could see cracks and hollows in the trunk where disease and injury had left their marks. Despite all that, it grew quite lush.
He looked around to see if there were others like it, and there were none. A few well managed coppices of bamboo, some lonely looking fruit trees, but everything else near the village had been cleared away for farming or firewood.
Tian detoured around the cattle and made his way inland from the river. A local had suggested he stay at the shrine when he asked about the inn. Now he regretted not listening to the advice.
The shrine was a little thatched roof affair. A rotting lattice screened what once held a small sacrificial altar and some tablets. It had not been a home for a god for a long time, judging by the litter left by passing derelicts. The smell of stale urine was piercing.
Tian looked up. Cloudy, but it didn’t smell like rain. Still, his tent wasn’t all that waterproof. Dustproof, yes, and it would shed water well enough from the roof, but the little liner that sealed the bottom tended to accumulate damp in heavy rain. The water would seep through the fabric and slowly soak his sleeping pad. Everything needed to be carefully dried afterward, or there was the most depressing smell of damp and mildew.
A gamble then. Rain, or the urine haunted, rat infested former temple.
He had the tent set up in two minutes and was constructing a little stone-lined pit for his cooking fire within three. He had slept in smellier places, but that didn’t mean he liked it. Clean was better. It was one of the good things he noticed when he first came to the temple. Everything was clean. Nothing smelled bad. He had his own safe, dry, clean place to sleep, where no rats could come and bite him while he slept.
An illusion. An illusion, but real for him. A kind illusion. For him. He couldn’t see what his comfort was built on. How bizarre. He wouldn’t have cared if he had known. It was Brother Fu, and the other senior brothers, who gave him a conscience and taught him it was important to care about other people. What a strange, terrible thing for them to do.
Camp chores done, he found himself at loose ends. Usually that meant even more cultivating, but he was feeling faintly sick of it. It hadn’t been long since he got the Eighteen Dragon Subduing Palms, and he had certainly absorbed enough yang qi. A good time to start practicing, then.
First move- Proud Dragon Repents. The key, according to the diagram, was in using three parts power, retaining seven parts. The pose defended with the left hand, struck with the right palm. The feet were planted, but with flexibility in the knees. He circulated his vital energy as the diagram instructed and struck out.
Then did it again. And again. And again. And again. Sometimes softer, sometimes harder. Sometimes he put a little more bend in his knees or stood taller. The defensive left hand saw more prominence or less, circled faster or slower. Always picking at the problem of what, exactly, the creator had meant when he said that true mastery of the move lay in the reserved power. It never quite clicked, but that was fine. This was apparently a supreme combat art. If it came together quickly, he would have to assume he made a mistake.
After half an hour or so, he switched to the second move- Dragon Soars the Sky. A jumping attack specifically to strike at the head and neck of the opponent with one’s palms and vital energy. The energy flow was quite simple. The movements were anything but.
Dragon Soars the Sky was, according to everything he had been taught and everything he had seen, deeply stupid. The senior brothers at the Temple had been clear- a jumping attack was like a sneak attack. Devastating to the enemy if it landed, devastating to you if they saw it coming. Once you were in the air, you were committed, and open to a fatal counter. The potential reward was almost never worth the certain risk.
Yet here it was, the second move of a supreme art, much praised by the author for its tactical flexibility and devastating power. How odd. How very odd. He started jumping and striking down at the open air, moving from first stance to second, or from his ordinary boxing to this strange maneuver. The vital energy required by the art was insignificant to him, but the mental focus needed was exhausting.
He jumped around the clearing like he was trying to kill a million mosquitos from above. A perfect move to practice while you were trying to run away from your thoughts. He jumped and jumped and the silliness of it overwhelmed him. His moping couldn’t keep him down- the laughter rose like the sun within him and burst out. He was helpless with laughter, even as he jumped and swatted his way through the clearing.
“Boy are you crazy? You look crazy.” A raspy, gurgling voice intruded on Tian’s focus. Only his inhuman reflexes saved him from landing like custard.
“I’m not crazy, I’m just not well. Are you crazy?” Tian asked, his voice filled with the brightness of someone about to deliver a one sided beating. Then his face fell. Even in his petty, vengeful mood, he wasn’t going to beat up someone who…
Who…
It was a lot.
The vagrant’s head was far lower than it ought to have been, his shoulders much higher. Higher than the top of his head, in fact. His neck jutted straight ahead of him like a vulture. In a desperate bid to disguise the head-shoulders inversion, the man had tied his ponytail straight up from the very peak of his alarming crown. Which was bad, but understandable. Less understandable was using some whitish paste to glue the ponytail upwards in a spike two feet tall.
On the other end of him, he barely had any legs. Tian could make out feet, but the legs themselves seemed to be almost tucked into his torso. The torso, for its part, had been compressed upwards, as though his organs had been shoved upward by his thighs in the feeble hope that maybe they would pop the head, neck and shoulders back into a proper arrangement.
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His arms and hands would usually be described as “spindly” or “dead for a week,” but given their normal length on the man’s stunted frame, they looked enormous. Monstrous. Despite all that, there was the faintest trace of immortal breath on him. As though he was just barely level one of the Earthly Realm.
“Crazy? Would a crazy person be so successful?” The twisted man boasted. It was a curious boast from someone visiting an abandoned temple wearing clothes even worse than Tian’s own shabby outfit. He was carrying a small sack on the end of a stick slung over his looming shoulders. Perhaps it was full of money.
“I don’t know. Would they?”
“They would not.” The odd looking man shook his odd looking head.
A pause settled over the clearing.
“Juniors should introduce themselves first.”
“Yes, that’s right.” Tian nodded. Then went silent again.
“Boy, unless you are an immortal practicing an age regression art-”
“Who is? Really, who? I want to find these age-regressing immortals. I have a lot of questions for them.” Tian really did too.
“What is your name?”
“Oh, well, that’s why I wasn’t saying anything. I don’t have one right now. Perhaps Senior could pick one out for me. What's the senior's name?”
“I? I am the famed diviner, the legendary Outspread the Discombobulated!” The “successful” man spread his bird-boned arms wide.
“Never mind, I’ll manage without one somehow.”
“Don’t run from success, Boy, or it will never catch you. Be like me, and gratefully receive it.” Outspread spread out his arms again. Tian was painfully reminded of the crane.
“How exactly are you successful?” He went for the distraction.
“Easy. With my sewing and washing, I earn enough to fill my mouth, and with my divination, I earn enough to feed ten very skinny men! Aren’t I more successful than the peasant pushing his plough or the bargeman pushing his pole? When the authorities levy troops, I turn up and wave my arms, willing to do my martial duty, yet I am never drafted. Am I not better off than the ghosts of the ones who did get picked? Likewise, when the village is called on for corvee labor, I come bright and early. But, mysteriously, I am always exempted from the strenuous digging, hauling and carrying. Aren’t I better off than all those people with their broken down bodies and shortened lives who labored in the sun? AND YET!”
Discombobulated raised a finger in pale imitation of the spike of hair rising from his head. “And yet, when it comes time for the authorities to make provisions for the disabled, I receive three large measures of grain and not less than ten bundles of firewood. You see a man suffering from misfortune. I see a blind boy, who cannot see good fortune when it arrives. Worse, who couldn’t receive it even if he recognized it.”
Tian thought it over for a minute, then nodded. “Alright, I’ve learned something. Whether it’s useful, I don’t know, but I did learn it. I’ll fix you a cup of tea, Elder. That way you won’t have worked for nothing.”
“Hmm. Who says filial piety is dead in the younger generation? Other than me, obviously.”
“No idea. Do you like red tea?”
“Any yellow tea?”
“Never seen yellow tea. Well, I’ve seen tea that turned yellow, but I don’t think that’s what you mean.” Tian shrugged.
“It’s green tea but you smother it first. Don’t worry about it. Red will do.”
Tian served. He didn’t do the full tea service, as he wasn’t sure if the elder could survive the extra qi in the drink. That was no excuse to ignore his tea pets, however. Little White, the lotus, seemed to drink her tea happily enough, and the Phoenix, still looking for a name herself, shone merrily in the sunset. The new arrival, the very round pig, was also lacking a name. All Tian could think of was “Mr. Pig.” He seemed a good natured fellow, and had an auspicious air to him. Tian would understand his depths more with time.
The elder snaked the cup with a too-boney hand and downed it with an upsettingly loud slurp. “Good tea! Bloody good tea. Boy, are you a bandit? You look more like a madman than a bandit, but how could a madman get such good tea?”
“Hmm. This tea was a gift from a tea friend I met along the river.” Tian smiled a little at the memory.
“Why don’t I have such friends?” The diviner grumbled. Tian poured him another cup. “HMM! Even better on the second steep. Tell you what, I won’t make you work for free. One divination, on the house!”
“Which house?”
“What?”
“Which house is the divination on?”
“Oh, Mrs. Bu’s place, one block down from Wei’s tailor shop. If you reach One Eye’s fish stall you have gone too far. She had a new thatch roof put on last summer, we will be very comfortable.” Discombobulated waved vaguely towards the river, or possibly another continent.
“Long way to go for a divination, but you are the expert.” Tian shrugged.
The diviner was staring at the dregs in his cup, then frowned. The effect of the strangely positioned, jutting head with its even more jutting spike of a pony tail, suddenly frowning was enough to make Tian the discombobulated one for a moment.
“Boy, do you have any… unsavory habits?”
“I don’t think so, but then, I wouldn’t know, would I? Could you narrow it down?”
“Are you… interested in girls?”
“Not romantically.”
“Boys?”
“Not romantically.”
“Would you say that… you had carnal knowledge of a bird, you filthy little degenerate?! Confess at once!”
“Does eating poultry count as carnal knowledge?” Tian was the one to spread his arms this time.
“Ancestors preserve me, I hope not.” Outspread the Discombobulated shook his head. “But it says here you are chasing your daughter, who is a bird. And that means you did something dreadful with a different bird. And I drank your tea. In a long, happy life, this may be my darkest day.”
Tian blinked. Then blinked again. “She’s adopted. A foster arrangement.”
Outspread counter-blinked. “Fostering. A bird.”
“Yes.”
“Boy, are you crazy?”
“I’m not crazy, I’m just not well. Do the tea leaves happen to say where she is?”
“Grave danger, but not right this minute risk of death. Dark clouds to the east, snake leaf amongst metal hills. Don’t know how, but your bird must be in the hands of the Iron Range Gang. But fighting them is impossible. Their great chieftain, lord guardian and master sage are all cultivators. I am so sorry for your loss.”
The crane hadn’t been rescued either. Did… did the heavenly person heretic have other parasite bodies it passed the bird cage to? Or did the crane fall to the ground and get traded to whoever these bandits were? Ultimately, it didn’t matter. He had accepted responsibility for the crane, and he was not about to abandon her. Not everyone had abandoned him, after all. One name in particular came to mind.
It was good that he went for a walk. Walks let you put a lot of things in context, get your own head straight, and you never know when good fortune might run up behind you, waving its spindly arms.
Tian started packing up his tent. “Are you going to spend the night here, Diviner Discombobulated?”
“What finer blanket than the heavens, what better bed than the earth?” The diviner did his best to look dignified and austere. It kind of worked, a bit.
“Open to a bit of work for hire?”
“I would never-”
“That involves sitting around, having a good sleep and a decent meal?”
“...refuse to aid a junior asking me for help. Please, speak on.”
“If a tall woman wearing a veil comes by, tell her where I went. You said the Iron Range to the East?”
“Mmm? Well, yes, you just run towards the rising sun and eventually you will reach it. It’s six days away, though, and like I said, cultivators.”
“Yeah, good enough. Here, payment in advance.” Tian handed over a roasted chicken leg, a bowl of cold rice and some pickles.
“I… don’t think I saw where you got these from. Or where your tent went.”
“Oh yes you did.” Tian smiled, his teeth bright and ghostly in the early twilight. “Like you said. Cultivators.”