The anemic human-looking expert summoned by the White Peacock strode forward first. “Junior Stormblossom, I carry the honor name Wine Ghost, but you know me as Yimeng. Willing to learn?”
The human who had accompanied Daoist Brightheart collapsed to his knees and kowtowed. “Willing! This junior is very willing to learn whatever the great elder is willing to teach!”
“Good! Follow me!” Stormblossom scrambled to his feet and left with Wine Ghost, a look of unconcealed joy on his face. The toad and the… whatever it was… glanced at each other. The goat-sheep-monster-thing stepped forward first.
“You won’t have heard of me. I know you, though, girl. I can feel the rage boiling in you. All that fire. The urge to pierce through the lies, the obstinate foolishness, and the sheer hatefulness of vile people. Even people who don’t know they are vile. The urge to trample them, crush them, as you force them to confront their truths, and do better. Such a powerful urge, and it fires your blood like nothing else. You fear it. Hate it, even as it gives you strength and meaning. Sickened by the knowledge that your love of that fire outweighs your fear of it.”
Hong cupped her fist and bowed. Tian didn’t have to see her face to know what it looked like.
“Me too. After all my thousands of years, the fury only burns brighter, not dimmer. I will not accept you as a disciple, for the same reason I wouldn’t accept a baby as a disciple. I will, however, teach you a few things. How to rule your emotions while still feeling them, and an art to separate truth and falsehood. I will also provide a good cultivation environment so your journey to the peak of the so-called Earthly Realm is swift. My price is that you use what I teach you honorably and well.”
The monstrous head seemed to leer at Liren, the combination of fangs and palm sized human teeth even more distressing than the horn extending from the beast’s head.
“It’s a high price. One you might even find cruel, though you don’t think so now.” He paused. “Willing?”
“Your student is willing to learn.” She started to bow, but froze in mid air.
“Good. I am called Merciless. In time, you will see how true the name is. Don’t genuflect to me. I do not accept your worship. I demand your obedience. Now, follow.”
Tian looked over at the toad. He controlled the urge to offer his respectful greetings, the Lark’s warning still fresh in his ears. The toad nodded slightly.
“Good. You would have been sent out of the Holy Land if you had said something. You may greet me.”
“Ancient Crane Monastery’s Tian Zihao greets Venerable Voidcatcher.” He cupped his fist and bowed deeply.
“Mmm. Rise. We have fate together.”
It was news to Tian. He waited for Voidcatcher to elaborate. He did not. The two stood there, unmoving, for forty minutes. Eventually Voidcatcher spoke.
“I give you permission to speak to me even if I haven’t specifically asked you a question.”
“Thank you, Elder.” Tian bowed again.
Silence descended once more.
“No comments?”
“On what, Elder?”
“Fate, our connection, what I might intend to teach you?”
“None, Elder.”
Tian thought he could detect a current of humor in the toad’s voice, though it might be his imagination. “Comfortable with your ignorance, are you?”
“Confident that I will learn what I should eventually, even if it’s not the answer to everything I wondered about.”
Voidcatcher nodded at that. “A very yin sort of man, though with strong yang vitality. Patient yet curious, holding both mercy and malice within you. How toad-like. I won’t transmit any arts to you. Instead, I will teach you medicine. Herbology, medicine compounding, and a bit of acupuncture if you learn quickly enough. I will also provide a very suitable cultivation ground, since I can tell you are the sort to cultivate every moment you can.”
“And the price, Senior?”
“I’m not sure. My instinct says that you are already paying it, though no matter how long I meditate, I can’t figure it out. We have certainly never met, and my only disciple was murdered years ago. I have no children I care about, nor could you have met one of my teachers. I truly do not understand.”
Tian didn’t either, but he wasn’t about to agree to anything blindly.
The toad glanced at him. “At my level, I trust my instincts more than I trust reason. I won’t ask too much. What can you offer? And you know better than to offer your little material wealth, I think.”
Tian thought about it for a few minutes, before answering. “I won’t use your teachings in a way that troubles my conscience, and will use them in a way that is true to my dao path, as I come to understand it.”
That had the toad rocking back on his hind legs. “That’s it?! Boy, a village midwife wouldn’t teach you to cry for that kind of price!”
“Forgive me, Elder, but what can anyone promise other than that? If I promised obedience, I would be obedient until I wasn’t, now or ten thousand years from now. If I promised service, I can’t promise my service would be useful, or that I would faithfully serve if I thought matters were no longer fair. My skills and possessions are not worth mentioning. The me that stands before you has no value that is worth your time and teachings. I can only say that I will do my best with what you teach me.”
This content has been misappropriated from NovelFire; report any instances of this story if found elsewhere.
The toad looked at him for a long moment. “If I wasn’t sure to the middle part of my bones that you had already done me a significant service, I really do think I would turn you away and have you sent down the mountain. Lucky for you, eh?”
Tian could only bow again, feeling a bit aggrieved. What more could a teacher reasonably expect, beyond their student not being a scumbag and doing the best with what you taught them?
“The Medicine Ancestor elder of the Pure Leaf Alchemy Hall offered to call me granddaddy and change his last name to mine if I was willing to teach him how to compound my Three Mercies Draught, let alone transmit a deep education on herbal medicine! And you are offering, what? To be a decent person and not do wrong… no, you aren’t even promising that! You are just promising not to betray your conscience and your dao!”
Tian kept his mouth shut. He was pretty sure he didn’t have anything useful to contribute.
“Well? What do you have to say for yourself, boy?”
It seems he was wrong.
“I’m sometimes arrogant, Elder, I can be insensitive, and ruthless, and I have been repeatedly scolded and punished for a lack of filial virtue. However, despite that, I do believe in the Three Supreme Virtues, and try to live my life according to them. My main interests are medicine and tea, which has its origins as a sort of medicine. When I am not otherwise needed, I generally visit patients in the hospital, trying to brighten their day. My promises are worth little, my skills less, and I’m broke. What can I offer other than my assurance that I will do my best with what you give me, and that I don’t think I’m a bad person?”
Tian and the Toad Elder stared at each other for a long moment. “You know I can search your memories, right?”
“Yes, Senior Voidcatcher.”
“And all your little friends from the sect.”
“Yes, Senior Voidcatcher.”
The silence gathered around them once more, but Tian was comfortable there.
“Really? Broke?”
“Yes, Senior. I don’t have a single spirit stone on me.”
“Really?”
Tian pulled off his storage rings, and pulled out his string of rings from inside his sleeve. “Senior is welcome to inspect. I have nothing worth hiding.”
Voidcatcher sent out a thread of qi and picked the rings up. He seemed to glance at them momentarily, then his large body shuddered. “The bastards even stole your tea stuff. Damn. Bullying juniors is contemptible, and robbing them is ten times worse. One should only rob the wealthy and the powerful. They are the ones with the good stuff, it’s no use robbing the poor. Heaven knows, I’ve tried often enough. Learn from my experience, Junior.”
The giant toad sighed, his vast dewlap waxing and waning like the moon. “It seems I will have to teach you how to gather as well as how to compound. I’ll scold little what’s-his-name when I see him, tell him to get his sect in order! Alright, I accept. I’d expect you to genuflect, but I’ve never liked seeing humans do that.”
“No, Teacher?”
“Makes you look too much like frogs. Never got along with frogs.”
Voidcatcher’s cultivation ground shouldn’t have surprised Tian. Where would a toad cultivate if not next to a pond? What did surprise him was that the whole area, every blade of grass, every reed, every speck of floating duckweed, everything, was a medicinal plant. Or poison. It all depended.
“I took a look at the medical books you are working with. The good news is that they are only eighty percent wrong, and of that eighty percent, almost ten percent is merely insufficiently precise while still being roughly correct in basic principle. A nearly thirty percent correct-ish medical education is better than I could have hoped for, so we are off to a good start there.” Voidcatcher was obviously making an effort to be encouraging, which was discouraging.
Tian controlled the urge to defend Doctor Pei and the other doctors who had trained him. He knew perfectly well that they would tell him to shut his mouth and treasure every word.
“Tell me, Student Tian, what is the most important thing in medicine?”
“Attitude, if you are speaking philosophically, Teacher, and triage if you aren’t.”
“Triage?”
“Yes. I’m most used to high casualty situations. My training was as a field medic and hospital orderly. I spent a few months, long ago, working as an herb boy, but I suspect my herb gathering training won't be very useful here.”
“On the contrary, it’s the most useful thing you learned. That, and that Demon Pulling art. Unbearably crude and unacceptably dangerous, but it does teach you some very, very useful things. No matter. Attitude was a decent answer, sincerity towards healing, medicine and the like, however your dao expresses itself. But that is too abstract. I’d say the most important thing in medicine is knowing what’s wrong, and knowing what you should do about it. What we will concern ourselves with is primarily diagnosis, and determining which herbs may provide treatment. We will do this by developing a deep understanding of the sorts of afflictions the organs can suffer, and what herbs influence those afflictions. We start with one herb, then two herb combinations, and progress from there.”
Tian nodded. It made sense. A little conservative, but that’s only sensible when studying medicine.
“To aid you in both diagnosis, plant identification, utilization, and a host of other beneficial purposes, you are going to pick and eat the plants around my garden. As you start gaining a little understanding of them, I will assign more types of plants to try. And don’t worry. They are all, well, almost all, technically in the Earthly Realm.”
“Technically, Teacher?”
“Where are you again? It’s just lucky I have all this available. If you offered any kind of price, I’d do something a bit less crude, but oh well. You made your choice and now you can live with it. You can tend to my weeding and gain an education at the same time.”
Voidcatcher let his words press on Tian before moving on.
“Besides, the supplemental vital energy you will be ingesting is immense. The purity of your body and the Demon Pulling Art tells me that you will have no trouble handling the impure or chaotic qi you come across, and, naturally, I will not permit you to die.”
That sounded ominous. He could indeed turn poisons into tonics, but that didn’t mean being poisoned was nice.
“It was one of the rules- that we could take whatever we pleased, so long as we could pay the price. I suppose the price of eating the grass is overcoming the poison?”
“One of them, certainly. Price, like violence, is a broad concept in the Myriad Colors Holy Land.” Voidcatcher tucked his legs under him and closed his eyes. It was still surreal, talking to a toad that was larger, and many times heavier, than himself. Tian could accept the giant birds, and even giant beasts felt… acceptable… but a giant toad doctor was just too confusing.
He exhaled lightly. When things are confusing, simplify. Nothing complicated about eating grass.
“Pick one stem of grass from that patch there, next to the little blue flowers. Memorize the shape of the leaves, the texture, the color, the way the light reflects off of it, the smell, everything you can. When you pull it from the ground, memorize the shape of the roots. See what breaks, and what you manage to keep intact. Don’t eat the roots for this one, just the above ground portion.”
Voidcatcher sounded a little bored. Bored was, in Tian’s experience, good. It’s when the doctors got intense that things were going wrong.
“This one, Teacher?”
“Sure. Oh, actually, have you eaten anything today?”
“No, Teacher.”
“Lucky for you, eh? Okay, eat up!”