“We describe the Earth Realm as divided into nine ascending levels, but this is merely colloquial convenience and an intellectual misstep. In truth, it’s nine cycles of destruction and creation, returning to one at the end. Upon that return to one, there is a greater transformation, and a new cycle begins.” The ancient diviner explained.
Tian and Hong listened patiently. They didn’t have any choice. Once they read the sign, they found themselves irresistibly guided onto the stools in front of the booth. Even the crane was given a stool to perch on. They had barely settled before the diviner, who hadn’t yet introduced himself, started his monologue, the words forming a mysterious harmony with the rain battering on the awning. They would complain, but that seemed both unwise and impossible at the moment.
“Each time, the vessel breaks and a new, greater, one is formed from the accumulation of what came before. We can learn by analogy from this principle.” The diviner’s voice was still rich and smooth, despite his apparent age.
Tian appreciated the easy listening. He had gotten better at interpreting metaphors and had memorized the more common ones, but he still trusted analogies less than the discount tea leaves at the bottom of a peddler’s box. Also, he had several burning questions for this diviner, none of which had anything to do with basic cultivation theory. Asking them was becoming increasingly urgent. The diviner plainly didn’t care.
“Kingdoms fall. Sects fall. The people wither, their accumulated wisdom is lost. Virtue is lost. The long chain of filial piety is broken, and the ancestral tombs are left unswept, for those who would sweep them are scattered bones. Yet we see a trend. That which is broken becomes something new. New kingdoms rise, new sects, new people, building on what lessons they can take from the successes and failures of those who came before. There are times of stagnation or regression, but the trend is positive. Ultimately, what matters is the foundation set by the ancestors, and the will of their successors. Should they be firm and deep, the future will be better than the past.”
The diviner stroked his long white beard and smiled. “Yet, we revere the ancients, revere our ancestors, and as a matter of both logic and doctrine, those things which are eldest, the most primordial, are the most powerful and truest to the dao. The more complex and cluttered things become, the more we suffer and the poorer our lives. How do we resolve this? Disciple Hong?”
Hong’s mouth shifted, clearly wanting to say something colorful and controlling herself. Eventually, she said “Complexity and simplicity are also cycles, and there is a difference between reaching simplicity because you have the right mindset, and the simple life of the broke and ignorant.”
“Corrcect, but incomplete. If the goal of daoist cultivation is a reunification with the dao, or at least as much as is humanly possible, then that requires a return to simplicity. It requires moving away from complexity. Severing relationships or simply allowing them to whither. Caring about fewer irrelevant matters. Wanting less. Doing less. Secluding oneself in the mountains to surrender to nature and illuminating our true selves. The simple act of living is an explosion of yang, fading inexorably to yin and death. The more brilliantly you burn, the faster you fade. How do we differentiate our Daoist stillness from death?”
Tian shook his head while Hong leapt into the answer. “Balance. One can move and be still. One can think a lot about a few things, not letting their mind get cluttered. Nobody gets out of life alive. So what if we burn out? So what if we eventually become so still we die? We will be relieved of our burdens in the afterlife, and rise again, ready to explode.”
“It seems your brother disagrees. Disciple Tian, where does her analysis fall short?”
“At the very beginning, Elder.”
“How so?” The diviner looked curious.
“She accepted your premise, so her conclusions can never be more correct than her foundations. However, there is a part of those foundations that…” Tian struggled to find a polite way of saying “You are talking absolute nonsense,” and couldn’t. He opted for silence instead. A year of debating policy on the Windblown Manor had exposed him to many traps of logic and rhetoric. A senior’s easy confidence wasn’t enough to blind him any longer.
The old diviner didn’t take any offense. His gentle smile widened into something truer.
“Indeed, indeed. Where do you see an error in my framing?”
“Elder, this junior has heard a lot about cultivation, but he’s never once heard that the goal of cultivation is reunification with the Dao. It’s impossible just as a matter of logic. The dao is, and is in, everything. We are the dao or a very small piece of it. We can’t unify with something we are already part of. We can only understand ourselves better. Since the dao is the myriad things, understanding ourselves is understanding the simple and understanding the complicated. Sometimes that means living stark naked in the jungle, hiding out from everyone, and sometimes it means building complicated irrigation systems and figuring out rice farming.”
Tian tried to keep his language polite, but his enormous irritation, and growing fury, made it difficult. “It also means trying to understand our Elders.”
“That can be difficult.” The diviner faintly raised an eyebrow. “You seem to have had some success at that, however.”
Neither of the juniors said anything. Swearing at someone beyond the Heavenly Realm seemed unwise.
“You have had almost a year and a half to work on your assignment. You understand, better than almost anyone, just how we got to our present situation. You know just how dire the situation is, and how intractable. Tell me. How do we win the future?” The diviner wasn’t wearing the sect uniform. He was wearing a dusty blue robe, the tortoise shell in front of him looked battered and worn, even the coins and wooden sticks on the little booth looked battered and worn. Items with a past, for divining the future.
“The answer you wanted us to find is that ‘we’ don’t. ‘We’ accept that the kingdom and the monastery will fall, which will clear away all the corrupted elements and leave room for healthy new growth. Us, Senior Brother Fu, Elder Rui, and some others.” Hong answered.
Tian didn’t nod, but followed up on her answer. “A natural, healthy cycle. Elder, I wonder if you could clear some of my confusion.”
“If I can.” The diviner nodded, and tapped the sign behind him. “Questions answered, Heaven’s Secrets Revealed. Though I don’t know most of the secrets.”
“The war against the heretics- we have already lost many brothers and sisters, and will lose many more, strategic array or not. The Heretics won’t leave anything left to build a kingdom from, let alone a monastery. Not to mention what will happen when our ‘allies’ see us collapse.”
“True, as far as it goes, but you are missing some key pieces. Daoist Blackiron and I reached a similar epiphany many thousands of years ago- to tie our fate to the fate of a kingdom and use that to clear any obstacles to our cultivation. I, being orthodox in outlook, accepted the imposition of merit and sin, and worked to ensure a virtuous cycle formed. Daoist Blackiron, being heretical, was unwilling to accept any judgement of morality or propriety beyond his own.”
Tian’s eyes flew open, as did Hong's. She leaned forward and asked “You can simply… deny sin? Or merit?”
“It can be done, if one is willing to pay a sufficient price and suffer atrocious consequences. Most often, one pays a bitter, bitter price for a mere deferral. But then, Daoist Blackiron never lacked resolve. Morals, compassion, or the faintest shred of humanity, yes, but not resolve. I, on the other hand, was raised differently.” He laughed lightly. “I have really let down my teachers! Not to mention those brothers who outgrew our little mountain and spread their wings in the bigger world.”
A few more things clicked almost audibly inside Tian’s head. Starsieve glanced over at him. “It’s as you imagine. I was the third generation Sect Master, which makes the Ancient Crane my Grand-Master, and my master, the Myriad Blessings Child, created your cultivation method. I was privileged to hear the Ancient Crane herself proclaim the dao, and her teachings still echo and unfold in my ears.”
The old man sighed. “And then she flew away. She had only stopped on the mountain to rest a little while. But how could a crane not migrate? Perhaps in a few tens or hundreds of thousands of years more, she will return and look for us. It’s nice to imagine, anyway.”
The ancient looked into the sky. “Then my seniors left, my master left, good brothers and sisters left, or died, another form of leaving. My cultivation wasn’t lagging. I was my generation’s leading genius, if you can believe something so absurd. I just didn’t want to go. I loved it here. I loved my monastery. Loved my mortal family. Loved my juniors and the rivers and mountains and the wheeling birds and the feeling of peeking directly into the Celestial Court as I watched the stars and toasted the Goddess in the moon.”
His voice drifted away, then returned. “I think you know what happened next. If not exactly, then close enough.”
Tian and Hong nodded.
“Forgive me. The old ramble. You asked about the outcome of the war? I have arranged for quite a lot of people to die, many of them wearing the blue and white. People who should die, and some whose deaths will be unjust. Not everyone who deserves it, but quite a lot of them. The heretics are my borrowed knife, there. The surviving remainder of villains, or the merely surplus, have been maneuvered so they can’t interfere with the next step- bringing the surviving good and useful ones back. Those who have accumulated merit, or who will be pillars for the next Monastery.”
The heavy rains battered on the awning and on the tile roofs around them, layers of drums and thunder echoing around them, nearly as loud as the racing thunder of Tian and Hong’s hearts.
“Ancient Crane Mountain, as far as the kingdom and the world are concerned, will die. Faded into nothingness and memory. But it won’t die alone. I will break the heretic’s spine, and with it, scatter their strength. Without its spine, all its hard bones will be useless. The Black Iron Gorge will find itself without defenders, its wealth plundered by any whose fists are big enough to take it. Most likely one of those one-time defenders, but quite possibly not. The heavens are unsettled on that point.”
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Tian and Hong felt cold fear clamping down on their spines. He sounded far less moved by the thought of exterminating thousands of his own juniors than he did by the memory of his old brothers moving on to greater things.
“The Mountain supports the kingdom. When it vanishes, the kingdom will collapse. Awful people will prosper in the chaos, tens of millions will suffer and die. Those most deserving to suffer will live comfortably. For a time. Someone will take over, a prince, a noble, a general, someone. They will be raised by scholars trained in pursuing human virtue and benevolence. Some of it will stick. Good lessons will be learned from the Broadsky Kingdom and reinforced by cultivators. The new kings and nobles will exterminate the parasites, both to seize their wealth and prove their own virtue. The tension of benevolence and cruelty, the tension between vital energy, qi and shen, it’s much the same. The wheel will turn, and the world will be a better place soon enough.”
The diviner looked at the two growing immortals with soft eyes. “As for our neighbors… their juniors will test us, and nibble at the land. Their seniors will keep away, and nothing too dramatic will happen. In time, you will understand. This course was laid down before you were born. It is far too late to change it now. Surprises do occur, even for me. I had no intention of taking another disciple, but little Fu was just too perfect to pass up. Still, a single droplet flying from a wave doesn’t change the course of a river. These things will happen.”
“And the kids nailed to the floor?!” Hong’s voice turned raw.
“You asked the wrong question earlier. The key isn’t refusing sin and merit. It’s who is deciding what’s what. It’s not like sin or merit are inherent in the dao or some unshakable universal principle. Someone had to make the decision. Someone I know very, very well. One tends to be intimately familiar with old creditors. And now it’s time to pay up.” The diviner smiled. “Come, I will show you just how I intend to settle accounts. You really should have read my sign more carefully.”
“Elder?” Tian’s feeling of dread spiked to levels that would have had him running if his legs were still working.
“‘Special’ prices for Burning Heavens Cranes, not ‘better.’” The old man, so old he could remember the previous kingdom, grinned like a naughty child.
The old diviner snapped his fingers, and the short wooden sticks on the table flew into a bamboo tube. The tube gently shook in the air, once, twice, three times, and at the third shake, six sticks flew out and landed in a strange, blocky pattern.
“Dissolution or dispersion. Good, good.” Starsieve nodded happily. “But it never hurts to double check.”
He rapped his knuckle on the table and three ancient bronze coins hopped up and landed in the tortoise shell. He repeated this five more times, the coins jumping and flipping around but always landing in the shell.
“Deliverance, top line marked. Ah, a good omen indeed, whether I am prince or hawk. In either case, I am assured. Come, children. Let’s verify my skill in divination.” He waved his hand over the tortoise shell and the three coins became forty nine in a flash, overlapping and forming a sword. The yarrow sticks returned to their container, radiating an aura that made their stomachs knot and their throats tighten. The tortoise shell expanded, growing enormous. It soon filled the alley, and Starsieve placed everyone on it with a casual thought. The tortoise shell rose into the air, continuing to grow as it rose. Then they were off, flying south and leaving no trace of their passing.
“May I ask, Elder, how long…” Tian spoke slowly.
“Mmm? How long what? Have I known about you two? Or made arrangements for you? Once I heard about little Fu’s tribulation, I looked into him and everyone around him. Here is a useful tip- the more merit someone carries, and the stronger their destiny, the more strongly they resist divination. The destiny the two of you carry, to say nothing of the merits, made you really quite expensive to study.” Starsieve glanced down at Tian, and Tian had the sudden feeling of being seen by the entire starry sky. No wonder the Elder had such tolerance. Would the stars notice the impudence of an ant?
“Likewise, be cautious when confronting words like ‘destiny’ and ‘fate.’ They are like rivers- some mighty, some barely more than a stream. You can learn to work with them, manage them, divert them, or be drowned by them. And while you might not be able to change the course of a mighty flood, can’t you change your experience of it? One can travel both with and against the current, after all. If you are willing to pay the price.”
Starsieve’s eyes cooled as he looked over the kingdom, the mighty Green River a bare thread shining below them. “Why cultivate immortality if you didn’t intend to take some control of your life? I could split twenty miles of the Green River with a single slash of my sword before I was fifty, never harming a single fish or human, never even raising a splash on the river banks. Still. The river flows.”
The land was passing under them incomprehensibly fast. They must have been moving at a hellish pace, but not a single stir of air brushed their robes. The land dried out, turned brown, then the reds and blacks of the Redstone Wastes took over.
“Quite an interesting place, the Redstone Wastes, and much misunderstood. It has so much to offer for those with open minds. Daoist Blackiron never cared. Like living next to a cow for its warmth, never knowing about milk.” Starsieve murmured. The tortoise shell set down on a seemingly random stretch of basalt. “Ah, you have my delivery. Though, I notice with some disappointment, not my snack. Such is life, and divination. Even the best is imperfect.” Starsieve extended his hand, and the enchanted iron rods they collected from Heartmend’s corpse flew out of Liren’s ring and into the Elder’s.
“Stay on the shell. When all is said and done, it will return you to Ancient Crane Mountain and little Fu. And Jin Treasure, of course. The Jin family… that takes me back. Little Zheng and Little Jin were thick as thieves, always scheming with the biggest smiles on their faces.”
Starsieve laughed softly. “Hey kids, want your fortunes told? Real daoist magic, may I be struck by lightning if I tell a lie! Roll up, roll up, roll up and have heaven’s secrets revealed! True love, lost treasure, the will of the ancestors made plain, all things can be found by coin or stick! Come, come. Come and see, come and see!” Starsieve slowly danced, waving his sword through the air, high and low. There was a charm there, something at the furthest edges of Tian’s perception, but he knew it was the lightest brush of something far, far greater.
“What are you playing at, old fool?” A black shape manifested in the sky above them. Roughly human shaped. Roughly. The words were raspy and slow.
“I’ve come to read your fortune! Yours, and many others.”
“You are going to die. There’s a future for you.” The shape didn’t sound particularly happy or sad about that.
“Yes, yes, at long last! At long last, I am going to die today.”
The shape above stilled. “Ah.”
It started to vanish, but the yarrow stalks went flying out of their container, swiftly forming an array. Starlight began shining through the darkening sky, pinning the shadow in the air.
“You… Do you really think you are strong enough to kill me? Even if you burned away your soul, even if you spent every scrap of fortune and merit you accumulated-” The black shape started twisting in the air, and from it emerged a hatchet-faced man. Dressed in coarse black linen, he carried a heavy black knife, and little else.
Starsieve never paused his dance. Little scraps of paper, carrying strange hexagrams and pictures of animals, ghosts, monsters, demons, gods, the myriad wonders of creation, started fluttering down around him. More and more fell, giving the illusion of snow in the desert.
“Strong or weak, strong or weak, aren’t I both? Aren’t we both? Black iron- because you never bothered with polish, merely grinding your edge.”
The heretic’s face didn’t so much as twitch. He just lifted his heavy knife, and chopped down. Tian couldn’t put words to what he was feeling now, too many strange pressures battered his senses, too many mysteries, too much happening at levels he couldn’t perceive. He just knew that even the shadow of that knife would split him into so many pieces, not even the blood would be recognizable for what it was.
The sword made of bronze coins intercepted it, seemingly by accident as Starsieve danced around. Other than a gentle chime, there was no effect. Daoist Blackiron grunted in irritation.
“Let’s see you do that-” His words were cut off when the coin sword hacked down on seemingly empty space. Whatever was there, it was beyond Tian’s ability to perceive. It made Blackiron jump back, though.
The battle had been beyond his understanding from the beginning. Things- knives, talismans, strange shapes and beasts, manifested and vanished. Hallucinations, he supposed, his mind trying to interpret what was being pressed upon it. The tortoise shell was protecting them, that much was clear, but just the echoes of the battle were enough to near-crush the two juniors.
Tian had the uncanny feeling that the seniors’ treasured weapons weren’t even really weapons. They were proof of something, or at least evidence of it. What, Tian couldn’t even imagine.
“Do you want to hear your fortune, Daoist Blackiron?”
“My fortune is what I make of it! Your disgusting tricks are meaningless here, Starsieve. There is only the truth of a naked blade.”
“Your fortune is what you make of it. What good words. And quite true. Let me show you!” Starsieve waved his coin sword, and the world turned. Tian couldn’t understand it any other way- it was as though the elder was a pivot, and heaven and earth were revolving around him. Blackiron hacked out desperately with his heavy knife, then paused. Then hacked again.
“What did you do? Answer me, you old fraud, just what the hell did you do?”
“Me? Nothing. Well. Almost nothing. Your fortune is what you make of it, after all. And do you know what I make of it?” The sometimes kindly, sometimes manic elder was gone. In his place was something dreadful. A true old monster. One that had stopped giving a damn about anything at all thousands of years ago.
“I’m making dinner.” Starsieve spoke with quiet venom. The spinning disks of heaven and earth compressed, squeezing out… something.
Tian knew he was hallucinating. He knew what he was seeing couldn’t possibly be real, or the whole world would be torn apart. But before his eyes, heaven and earth ground together and squeezed the Redstone Wastes until they bled. Sinflames, burning black and red met echoes of golden merit. The bloated, black fortune dragon of Blackstone Gorge was forced into visibility, wrapped around the frantically chopping Daoist Blackstone. The bleeding, battered, golden fortune dragon of the Broadsky kingdom swam anxiously around Starsieve.
“I really must thank you for all your hard work these last few thousand years, Blackiron. Developing those Fortune Piercing Needles must have cost you dearly. Bit hard on the mortal kids, but that’s just how it goes, I suppose.” The black dragon launched itself at the golden dragon, knocking it down and ripping scales off it. Golden blood flew through the air.
“What the hell are you talking about?!”
“Fate and fortune, merit and sin. At least I knew I was running up a debt. You really thought you were stealing something. Let me show you what real theft looks like.”
The old diviner slapped his hands together, collapsing his coin sword into seeming nothingness. His tube of sticks flew up and shook one, twice, thrice, and forty nine stalks flew out. Through some impossible arrangement, they aligned themselves with the stars, forming a vast formation. And the wheels kept turning. Kept grinding. Kept squeezing out whatever it was from the cold earth.
From the twisting heavens, eight iron spikes silently emerged and pinned Blackiron in place, fixed between the millstones of heaven and earth.
“STARSIEVE!” The monster that created Blackiron Gorge didn’t roar, he screamed. There was a twist in space, a feeling of something becoming inverted without movement.
The golden dragon turned in the air, slipping out of the black dragon’s clutches, It rose like a serpent, and struck. The golden dragon bit the black dragon’s neck, and with a convulsive move, tore its head off.
Things got very choppy after that.
Tian had flashes of consciousness. He remembered lights, hundreds of pillars of light, rising into the night’s sky. He was on the tortoise shell, high up, but the lights still went higher. Blackiron consumed by something, sinflame and something else. Things he didn’t have words for. One fate dragon eating another, then burrowing into Starsieve’s chest.
At some point, he thought the dragon had burrowed through him and Liren.
At some point, he thought he was flying through the air, and hundreds of people were flying with him. All headed towards Ancient Crane Mountain.
He was standing on a path, looking up over a river plain. Starsieve was in the air, high, high up, but he could see him. The stars twisted once more, and Starsieve came apart, the ancient falling into innumerable pieces. All across the Broadsky Kingdom, there fell a golden rain on dry earth.