Tian and the crane soared out over the monastery, moving up towards a deep vein of malachite recorded in the guide to the mountain. It looked like it was an extension of the outcropping that Tian had found, and was somewhat common in the lower-middle parts of the east-south-east side of the mountain, where the Monastery was located. The guide mentioned it in passing, mostly as something to be avoided when digging for actually valuable minerals. Tian thought it looked pretty, and would shine up nicely with a bit of polish. Best of all, the ancients wouldn’t have wanted to collect it. A fine place to start.
The place he was targeting was only about a thousand vertical feet above the monastery, but it was almost a hundred and fifty miles away by foot. Tian couldn’t stop grinning as he watched the mountain curve and twist below him. The ability to just bypass all of that was almost addictive. He saw a stream roll into a flat stretch, spreading out and turning the soil into a boggy, buggy, reed and briar filled mess.
“I must not be smug. I must not be smug. I must not be smug,” He thought to himself, smugly.
Tian and the crane made their way to a sharp-sided valley cut by a deep stream. There wasn’t much to it- tucked in a fold of the mountain, it was rather dim and cool. Still, where there was water and light, there was life. Reeds lined the stream, and dense clusters of tough flowers bloomed with tiny blossoms of pink and buttery yellow. A few scrappy trees grew here and there, skinny, twisted and reaching for the light. Small animals rushed around, and insects buzzed and chirped and made a riot in the grass. It wasn’t short of birds either, from brilliant little darting sparrows and swallows, to doughty jungle birds Tian wouldn’t even attempt to name.
The side of the mountain here had clearly been cut, long ago. Ancient chisel marks were still visible, as were long lines where iron rods were hammered deep into the rock. In other places, the rock was sheared away so smoothly, it could only have been done by a heavenly person wielding a sword or saber. It seemed not everyone could be bothered to quarry properly.
The deposits around here were noted in the guide as a place where one could collect azurite. Not a very valuable mineral, but thanks to the dense qi of the mountain, it made rather pretty blue dyes, inlays and decorations. It also had some very minor benefits for shen cultivation, but those were mostly incidental. Its main value was that it was common enough to find near iron bearing rocks, easy to quarry, and pretty. Green malachite, while not ugly, wasn’t nearly so favored.
“Maybe I’ll get lucky and find some of both.” Tian began poking around the ancient cuts, figuring that the ancestors would have known where to look much better than he would. After an hour or so, he found nothing.
“It does occur to me that I don’t have any good way of finding minerals. At all. None of my arts are useful for this.” Tian told the crane, who didn’t reply. While there might be a total absence of shiny rocks, there was an adequate supply of tasty river grass, and she knew what was important.
“I guess I could try violence? Yeah, let’s try violence. I did want to test out my Dragon Suppressing Palms.”
Tian found a spot where the stone jutted out a bit. He hesitated a minute before digging out the pamphlet. It wasn’t complicated, but he had a dreadful certainty that quarrying stone was one of those things that was demanding of both skill and sweat. He steeled his resolve, and started setting the iron wedges. Once they were in place, he gathered his vital energy. Left hand circled defensively, right hand struck decisively, and he had to make sure he was applying equal force to each wedge…
Proud Dragon Repents struck out, driving the iron spike four inches into the iron-rich stone. Tian froze. He had tried to pull the strike, but it had flowed so easily. He quickly struck out, knocking the other wedges deep into the rock. Easy. So damn easy! He was stronger, that was part of it, but the art just flowed for him now. Everything that had seemed like a struggle, like it wasn’t quite right, now was.
He started running through the strikes- Dragon Soars Through the Sky, Thunder Shocks Far Away, Suddenly Leaping into the Abyss, Double Dragon Takes Water, they all came to him. They all flowed through him, as natural as breathing. A year and a half of practice, it wasn’t for nothing.
He didn’t have to think. Each blow, each step, each cycle of breath and vital energy was eager and ready for him to use them. It wasn’t mastered. The art was too deep to master in merely a year, but he was beyond the initiate phase. Beyond the novice phase too. He wouldn’t hesitate to rely on the art in a serious battle.
The stone fell away with a clatter. Not a hint of malachite in there, but that was alright. He could see a tiny finger of green coming out of the side of the mountain. He had a direction to dig in, and new art to test.
The crane sent him a curious thought. Tian responded with emotions of joy, and the image of two cranes building a nest. His eyes were on the mountainside, looking for a good spot to start cutting. He didn’t see the thoughtful look the crane was giving him. No longer focused on river grasses.
Tian smacked away at the rock face for a few hours, and while he did find a few small pieces, there wasn’t remotely enough to make into a bangle, let alone a matching pair. More irritatingly, he had run through all the convenient outcrops. There was just sheer mountainside left, and he was leery of digging into it. He decided to see what nature had managed to cut, and followed the flow of the stream down the mountain.
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It was a bit of a challenge. The ground varied between marshy, muddy, slippery and rocky. Sometimes the slope was gentle, other times near vertical. He quickly swapped his blue and white silk robes for rough brown linen, and stowed his shoes in his ring. It was a rough looking mountain daoist that scrambled over the rocks, strong fingers grabbing stones and strong legs jumping across gaps. It was marvelous fun.
A long scramble took him to a tiny waterfall, barely twenty feet of tumbling water battering its way down stone shelves to a marshy pond below. He briefly thought about jumping down into the pond, but something made him pause. There was a hint of something, a certain breath of qi…
A level nine animal. Some kind of snake or viper that had all but stilled its breath. It was too strong to truly hide, though, and it was on the hunt. Tian tried to look around and find what it was stalking, but couldn’t see it. He struggled to find the snake too. He could see roughly where the breath of vital energy was coming from, but even looking straight at the spot, he couldn’t see the snake.
Camouflage, then, and of the highest quality. The breath felt roughly like that of a level Nine, but he knew that animals and humans cultivated differently.
Difficult choice- leave the snake be, or get dinner and some potent poison for his body to refine. Choices, choices.
He agonized over the decision for almost a second, before sending a message to the crane. The crane leaped up into the air and flew over. A few flaps of her wings, then a sudden dive! Long legs stretched down, talons striking- and sliding off scales as hard as steel plates.
Tian had no trouble seeing the viper now. It, too, had learned to make itself gigantic. Mottled brown and gray, with streaks of green, its head narrowing to a point and ridges running over its eyes. It twisted and glared at the crane. The body, long as a tree was tall, and as thick around as three water barrels, coiled. The crane didn’t wait for it to strike. She flew up, and between the beats of her wings, grew enormous as well.
“She’s been holding out on me. She’s huge.”
The crane wasn’t any smaller than the snake. She wasn’t yet on the scale of Elder Redmane, but she was big enough to look down on the snake as merely dinner. The viper didn’t look like it wanted to run. Its slitted eyes glared up at the crane. Waiting.
“Venom. It must have poured a lot of strength into its venom.” Tian flung the thought towards the crane, then flung himself off the waterfall. Dragon Soars through the Sky was, without a doubt, the dumbest, most dangerous skill in the entirety of the Eighteen Palms of Dragon Subduing. However, under the circumstances, a flying attack was just what was called for. His blood boiled, and he grinned like a mad thing as he plunged downward.
No, not a mad thing. A dragon. The hungry smile of a dragon descending upon a snake. The crane fell on it from the opposite side. The serpent could only attack in one direction. It picked the bigger target. It lunged upward, shifting out of the way of Tian’s strike.
From within a rough linen sleeve, a rope dart struck. It didn’t aim to pierce the iron-plate scales, merely to wrap them. Even just a little bit. Metal threads extended, wedging themselves under scales. A strong left hand yanked the rope tight, redirecting his fall. The snake lunged, making the crane flap backwards, but pulling Tian forward even more quickly.
A slender white palm landed on the mottled scales on the back of the giant snake’s head, gentle, soft. There was a deep thud. The snake’s eyes flushed red, tears of blood flowing out, flooding out, blinding the ruined eyes as convulsions ran the length of the giant body. Under that slender palm, the iron-hard scale fractured, then shattered into keratin dust. The flesh beneath bruised, first purple, then black, then tiny beads of red rose and poured through the skin. The snake collapsed, shrinking as it fell.
Tian landed, feather light, on the ground next to the viper’s still twitching corpse. It had once been a tyrant. Eight feet long, merciless venom, near perfect camouflage. In this stretch of the lower mountain, it had few predators, and fewer rivals. It still fell under one perfect strike.
Tian looked at the heavens and screamed. He roared and yelled and hammered the ground. Gasping with laughter, he made every sound he could imagine, yelling at the top of his lungs. The crane landed next to him, glaring at him and wondering just why such a quiet person was making a riot.
How could he explain it? How could he tell her? Strongest in the Outer Court? Who cares?! A Heavenly Person could kill him with a finger. Inheritor of a legendary body refining technique? Blessed by merit? Those were great, but did he earn them with his sweat? No! They were things he chanced on. This was his! All his! He wasn’t a weak boy anymore. He knew it now in a way that he really believed. He hunted a big monster. He jumped from the slippery place and used his broken hand and still, still, killed it in one blow!
He wasn’t weak. He wasn’t a boy that had to hide in the shadows, scared of people and animals, and the rain drowning him under trash. All that, and he wasn’t alone. There was the crane here with him, and Brother Fu, and Grandad, and Liren, waiting impatiently back home.
He laughed even harder. Liren wasn’t the sort to wait, patiently or otherwise. He wondered what kind of hell she was raising. Did she feel strong? Did she feel beautiful? She should. She should!
The only thing that could make this moment more perfect would be finding malachite. A nice big hunk of malachite, with lots of those pretty rings in it. They looked like the rings on a tree, or maybe a shelf fungus. Some of those fungi were powerful medicines. He’d even take some azurite, though he happened to think the green would suit them better.
Tian walked over to the stream, and started looking around the river bed.
“I wonder what that snake was hunting. Level nine, and capable of gigantifying, it had to be after something special, right?”
Tian felt the faintest stirrings of immortal breath. Like it was just, just, barely capable of drawing in qi and producing vital energy. Tian froze. He didn’t believe that one bit. Not if that adder was after it. He carefully looked around. Got low, below the level of the grass. With delicate fingers, he carefully parted the reeds and moved forward. Scarcely daring to breathe.
He found his quarry on a chest-sized rock in the middle of the stream. Clinging to the rock, as though unwilling to let it go, was a bronze colored toad bigger than his hand. Tian could see there were seven black dots on its back, forming the shape of the Big Dipper. Its eyes were ruby red, but not hostile. If anything, it looked a bit desperate.
Tian could relate. The poor bastard only had three legs.