Tian decided to spend the night by the side of the stream. The toad surely didn’t need his protection, but he was curious to see what would happen with it. Nothing about it seemed malicious. It was just odd.
Tian ate one of the pre-packed dinners he and Liren cooked, then lounged by a fire. He read his medical textbooks for a while, then set them aside and just looked up. The crane settled in next to him, occasionally opening an eye and peeking at him, trying to see what he was seeing, but not seeing it. What was so interesting about looking at the moon?
Tian started talking to himself. Or maybe he was talking to the crane or the toad. Even he wasn’t really sure.
“The moon is supposed to be the supreme symbol of yin, femininity, and water. Which are three things that aren’t exactly synonyms, but at the same time kind of are. Water is feminine, yin is feminine, or I guess it’s the other way around- the moon and all that are yin, so yin gets called all that. Which, when you put it that way, sounds like absolute nonsense. But it seems to be true, which is crazy.”
He thought about it a bit longer, subconsciously touching his heart where the dragon had lived. Perhaps it lived there still, in some fashion. It was always a creation of qi, immaterial, though why it took the shape of a dragon was another mystery.
“Dragons, on the other hand, are supreme yang. Like the sun, but not the sun because the sun is a golden crow with three legs, despite looking like a little circle of light. Which also sounds like gibberish, but here we are. The yang qi turned itself into a dragon, or naturally formed in the form of a dragon, so there must be something to it. Maybe the sun is like dragons. So damn big, humans slap all kinds of nonsense on it, and it’s too big to notice or care, even if it looks smaller than the tip of my finger. The sun is the supreme symbol of the sun, the dragon is the supreme symbol of dragons. The emperor can be represented by the toad that eats money.”
He chuckled at the thought, his mind drifting to the chaos that was doubtless consuming the kingdom.
“What are we going to do?” He sighed. Despite being aggressively opposed to having any say in government, or even organizing people, Tian had benefitted from an extremely intensive and high level education in governance. Between the Windblown Manor and Censor Hanshen, not to mention his own travels and studying of history books and biography, Tian had quietly become a minor expert on the gentle art of government as practiced in the Broadsky Kingdom.
Learning more things was generally good, but he couldn’t help feeling like most of what he learned was what hadn't worked. Even the things that had worked didn’t work forever. But did that really mean Starsieve was right? Was a cycle of destruction necessary? The daoist in him thought it made sense. The human in him screamed it damn well did not. That was the thinking that had him living in the dump, covered in burns.
The big problem was that there were all kinds of things you had to take into consideration. You had to have a system that could feed, administer, and defend a billion people. This was managed through an extraordinarily complex network of messengers, signal relays, roads, canals, messenger birds, a dozen other things as well, and it still required very powerful regional governors. So whatever you designed had to take all that into account, and then you had to take into account the cultivators.
Tian reckoned sorting out the kingdom was manageable. The really sticky question was what to do with the Monastery. He had heaps of books on running mortal kingdoms. There wasn’t even a paragraph on running a monastery.
Something about this was tickling a very old memory. Something about… monasteries being badly organized? That wasn’t it. Grandpa Jun was explaining about monasteries, and saying they did too much. Or something like that, anyway.
“Lack of… organizational focus? Yeah, something like that. It’s a religious organization that owns a TON of farmland, villages and the like, and runs what is basically a second army that protects the kingdom, and teaches daoism and deals with natural disasters and monsters and heretics and has its own parallel economy that is also heavily invested in the kingdom’s economy. Put like that, it sort of a second kingdom parasitized on the top of the Broadsky Kingdom, except that the Monastery came first.”
He tried to work things out on his fingers and realized he wouldn’t be able to count them all if he really tried to count all the things the Monastery did. He had expanded his finger supply, and he still didn’t have enough. Horrible.
“So we either need to do less, or completely re-think how we manage all that.” Tian drummed his fingers on his knee, enjoying the extra beat to the rhythm. “The problem is, we were doing all that for, if not good reasons, at least not bad ones. Starsieve had his own motives for accumulating merit, but so did the Eight Directions Palace. Whatever ‘merit’ is, it’s a good thing for orthodox daoists, and it encourages us to help people. It can even protect us from tribulations, to an extent. Hmm.”
Tian shifted from drumming his fingers on his knee to rubbing his head. Maybe the rubbing would help the thoughts turn and process faster. It didn’t seem to be working, but maybe he just wasn't doing it enough.
“Even the merchants and mortal family thing wasn’t coming from a bad place. We need supplies, so we need to make it or trade for it, and in most cases, it makes more sense to trade for it. Not like the soap we make is magically more soapy than the soap made in West Town.” Tian muttered. “People have kids, and most of those kids aren’t cultivators, and there is only so much land near the mountain, and land near the mountain is valuable for a lot of reasons, so there has to be a system for dealing with all that. Except the current system is insane! Is there a word that means both ‘immoral’ and ‘vomit?’ There should be.”
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“It all worked until it didn’t. It worked because Starsieve made it work, and then when he stopped caring, everyone else lost discipline and started indulging themselves. Even the self correcting part of the system, the Disciplinary Squad, became corrupt. Hell, you had to be a hereditary disciple to join the Squad in the first place! The evil was locked in, no chance of real reform.”
He sprawled out on the grass, his eyes going back to the moon. Watching it drift across the sky, attended by all the twinkling little stars. He remembered doing that out in the desert. It was no less mysterious and wonderful now.
“How do you design a system that doesn’t rely on one old man keeping everyone else in line? His system worked without him basically okay for a few thousand years so there is something solid about the design, but this is just too big of a flaw to tolerate.”
The weight of the night settled softly over him. It wasn’t quiet- the forests never were. But it was the loudness of insects crying in the grass and the wind in the trees and water rushing over a riverbed. It was the cry of hunting animals, and the call of owls, all speaking the language of the dao.
“What a mess. What a complete mess. Our internal economy is already breaking down. They are hoping people will make a habit of scavenging the mountain as they move around. That’s not a good sign. Or maybe it is. It sure feels daoist.”
He sat up suddenly and put on a pompous air, explaining things to the toad.
“‘Oh, I was meditating on the nature of my bellybutton, and I found this rock, so I hit the rock a bunch, and now I have many rocks. Anyway, you have ‘em, maybe they will be useful for something.’ Then someone comes in. ‘Quick, I need so, so many rocks! An exciting new project is beginning, we are trying to build a left-handed observatory in case there are inverse stars shadowing the visible ones as one would deduce there must be based upon the theory of yin and yang. Since we are all obsessed with oppositional dualities.’”
Tian had to pause for a moment and take a hard look at the stars. There didn’t appear to be any yin-stars trailing behind the yang stars, but really, who knew if they were yang in the first place? If the moon was yin, why not the stars? His head started to ache.
“Solar fire yang, lunar water yin. Inseparable oppositional dualities. Except they aren’t, because despite what the trial grounds were on about, the elements don’t work in pairs, they are part of a five way system. It’s not just the sun and moon, it’s the stars and planets and constellations. It’s all too big. We are trying to describe the world, and we like things tidy so we pair ‘em up and organize ‘em, and it all basically works even if I’ve yet to hear a reasonable explanation for why ‘Earth’ and ‘Metal’ are two separate categories, and what part of a cloud is the metallic bit condensing water. But it’s from all this, all these first principles, the one-rock rules of the universe, that we have to figure out running a monastery and a kingdom.”
He covered his eyes with his arm, the weight of it knocking him flat again. “And… I’m dao companions with Liren, and I don’t know how any of this works in any sense other than the biological, and we aren’t getting biological. Yet.”
He laughed, a softly self mocking sound. “Ah, Grandpa, when are you coming back? I could really use some advice right now.”
Sure, what can I help you with?
Tian wondered if he was hallucinating. “Grandpa?”
I’m back.
“GRANDPA!”
Hahaha! You have been busy! I’m back sooner than expected.
“Sooner?! It’s been almost two years!”
Mmm. Beats four years or six years. If you had just holed up in your cave forever, I’d still be waiting. Good job.
“It’s been busy for sure. Who would have thought Old Toad would be the thing to wake you up?”
I’m not asleep or gone, I just can’t talk. And he wasn’t. It was when you healed your finger, then smacked that phony tribulation.
Tian thought that made sense. It took a full second before his brain planted its metaphorical feet and skidded to a halt.
“Since I healed my heart and got my finger back.”
Yep.
“So, when I was talking to Brother Fu and Liren…”
Mmmhmmm.
“You didn’t think to say anything?” Tian’s voice was hollow.
Why would I? You were doing some very important growing and thinking. I was very proud of you and the choices you made. Well done. Really. I mean it. Very, very well done.
“I’m glad, but for some reason, I feel kind of embarrassed. Um. About Liren.”
Tall girl, uses a spear, currently exploring a naturalistic style of painting that veers between a naive folk art and the more locally traditional flowing ink style? That Liren?
“Probably.” Tian briefly wondered what those words meant, then shook them out of his head. “Um. Did you hear what I said to her?”
Yep. You are quite right about being courted. You deserve to feel desired, and doubly so when it’s by the one you desire.
“Yeees… I’m still not… while I am very glad you are back…”
Never mind the small stuff, you picked up two nice little treasures here. That rock is a bit of a jumble of ores, no jade, but some modestly spiritual malachite and azurite are in there. Take it to the Wang Clan, they will make you bangles that will knock your socks off. They might even manage some teacups with the size of the rock.
“I’m still, wait, teacups, really? Do you think they could manage a little lidded cup with a saucer? I have to imagine it would look awesome.”
Hard to say, it depends on how they cut it. Maximizing yield from a stone like this is an art all of its own. But let's talk toad. Remember how I said cultivators just find random crap when they go out adventuring? You found a good one. Not… super useful for you, but definitely a good find.
“What is it, Grandpa?” Tian asked, still not entirely willing to move off the subject of Liren, but at the same time, very eager to.
That is your genuine article fortune calling toad. Also known as a money toad. Stick him in your house, or I guess your pond will do, make sure he’s facing in, not out, and watch the fortune roll in.
“Fortune? Like merits?”
Like money. Grandpa sounded like he didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I have a feeling things are about to get very interesting for you.