A week passed on the mountain. Tian slowly assembled his book of herbs, while his cultivation shot upwards like a startled bird from a bush. Liren wasn’t slack either, but she was starting from a little behind Tian as it was. She was settling down, starting to look at him again, but she still wouldn’t be in a room with him if the door was closed. She never explained why, and Tian didn’t ask. He simply silently noted it down in his heart.
He hung Liren’s painting in his room. Every morning he would wake up and look at it for a few minutes, before washing, dressing and setting out for the day’s work. He did the same at night. Some nights, he dreamed he was in the garden, waiting. He sniffed the dry leaves in the tea pot, treasured the scent of the bamboo growing around the house, made sure his tea pets were nicely organized on the tray, and waited.
In his dreams, he tried to be a good daoist, and wait without anticipation, simply existing in the moment. He never managed it. He knew Liren was there, just out of sight. But no matter how he looked for her or how he called, she never appeared.
When it was Liren’s birthday, Tian waited outside the door of her room.
“No breakfast?” She asked.
“I’ll cook, but first I wanted to give you your present.”
“Oh? What is it?”
“A song. Or a tune, maybe? Whatever you call music on a flute.”
Liren opened her mouth, closed it, opened it again, then frowned. “I don’t know either. Both, maybe?”
Tian smiled. “The song doesn’t have a name. I tried hard to think of one, but it was harder to come up with a name than to write the song, and I have been working on the song for half a year now. Since the day I went looking for the stone that became our bangles, in fact.” Tian held up his wrist, the green and blue catching the dawnlight and dazzling the eye.
Liren looked away, and nodded. Tian guided her to a cushion he had set out on the porch. He stood a little way into the garden, and took out his bamboo flute. It took a deep breath for him to raise it to his lips. It took another for him to gather his courage, and a third to begin to play.
Tian had never been comfortable with his own words. He had been imitating his brothers his whole life, memorizing their little sayings, their verbal tics, and slowly melding them into something that, he reckoned, passed pretty well as “his” voice. No one had ever told him that was normal, that it was how everyone learned to speak. He thought he was like a mynah bird or a parrot, imitating what came naturally to others.
The flute had no words. This song was never written on a page or spoken of by another. Every breath, every sound, was his alone. He had never heard the right words to speak what was in his heart. He didn’t even have the words to think what was on his mind. He could only feel, and breathe out that feeling into the world. Hoping the right ears would hear, and understand.
What did Liren mean to him? She was the first cultivator he met that was his own age. Her life was inextricably intertwined with his, since before either knew the other existed. She was… too many things. Beauty that didn’t accept her beauty. Strength that knew she was strong, and screamed against her weakness. She was happy days on the Agate, and tragic days in the Wastes, and peaceful days in their home on the mountain. She was all the moments spent tending the garden and cooking dinner, or drinking his tea and bickering over nothing.
She was Liren. The point at which courage and grief intersected. She was his path to eternity, as he was hers. He feared many things, but not that future. Not her.
There was a space at the end, a moment that missed a continuation, still lacking the few notes to conclude the song. It was at that moment when he put down his flute. Liren was crying. Silently, unashamedly.
“Why did you stop? The song isn’t done.”
“It is still being written. One day at a time. Forever. Happy Birthday, Liren. I won’t remember your age, but every year I will add to the song. It will remember the important things for both of us.”
Life in the Myriad Colors Heaven fell into a numbing routine. Every day was pretty similar to the day before. Tian had the impression that the ancients liked it that way. They had long since gotten used to taking life one day at a time, not feeling anxious about what was to come. Their juniors, still burdened with mortality, were not so enlightened. It took a couple of months for Tian to get comfortable making the medicinal tea for Voidcatcher’s skincare routine, but he got there. He even started finding the ornate toad carvings on the furnace rather charming, and wondering just who was making the charcoal it burned.
Tian broke through to Level Nine ahead of Liren. Liren honored the achievement in the finest tradition of the West Town Outer Court with a raised thumb, not glancing up from her book.
Tian, a month later, acknowledged her breakthrough with a faint nod and “Is that why you aren’t passing the pickles?”
Tian did ask about special fruits that might instantly progress them to the peak of Level Nine. Voidcatcher nodded happily.
“Oh yes, there are loads and loads of ‘em in the Holy Land, and I’m only considering the ones that are safe for you to eat and have acceptable side effects. The best one for you, and your… concubine?”
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“Dao companion.” Tian said, a touch firmly. Voidcatcher always ‘forgot.’
“That’s adorable. Sure. Dao Companion. Anyway, I’d recommend Three Color Saw Leaf Heartbell Flowers. The three color variety is at the very lowest boundary of the Heavenly Realm, and in addition to maximizing your vital energy, it will fortify your body against the three tribulations you will encounter if your cultivation journey progresses far enough, and even help you find a state of epiphany. Valuable up here, priceless in the kingdoms below, truly one of the supreme herbs for raising an immortal. There are precious few pills that can even remotely compare.”
“Teacher has some?”
“You bet! I cleared out a whole field of them when I had to settle accounts with old Rotgut Hui. His so-called Medicine King Hall dared ruin my disciple’s good business, undercutting him on the price of pills? Hrmph, hrmph! The poor boy was always a genius of commerce, and always schemed against by his lessers. Naturally, I had to settle accounts.”
He’s just so pure, you know? A real cultivator of the old school. If it isn’t nailed down, it’s his, and if it is nailed down, he’ll take the nails too, then demand restitution for the wear and tear on the nail puller, plus labor, plus the carrying fee and a surcharge for work done outside of regular business hours. It brings a tear to this old ghost’s eye, it really does.
There was a pregnant pause.
“I need to fight you for the flowers.” Tian said.
“I’m not completely heartless. Shall we say… defeating ten of my clones per flower, each at the peak of Level Nine and possessed of the wisdom and combat ability I now have of battle in the Earthly Realm?”
“If teacher is unwilling to part with them, why not just make it a single heavenly realm clone? That should be more than enough.”
“Why would I make the fight easier on you? These are truly precious herbs, you know. Not like the weeds you are grazing on.” Voidcatcher rolled an enormous slitted eye and looked down on Tian.
That got another long pause.
“Easier?”
“Then fighting ten of me at my Earthly Realm peak? Yes. Obviously.” Tian had clearly grown on Voidcatcher. The “Idiot” was only implied.
“But… the Heavenly Realm has access to shen and qi. The ability to use them externally, I mean. Stronger, faster, can attack from vastly further away…”
“Boy, are things so bad in that fleabag monastery of yours that they have forgotten how to make talismans? I speak from personal experience when I say that with the right talismans, a person in the Earthly Realm can kill one in the Heavenly Realm. Then there are arrays, poisons, specialized weapons, curses, gu, dual cultivation techniques-”
“Dual cultivation techniques?!”
“Oh yes. Dangerous, mind you, but over time, a skillful little lover can leave their partner barely more than skin and bones, utterly hollowed out and wasted from within. Meanwhile, their power grows explosively. Take it from your old teacher. Repress lust, then transcend it.”
Voidcatcher leaned over Tian, his voice magisterial, his oily skin gleaming with hard earned life lessons.
“A smart man keeps his harem in the double digits. Low triple digits, maximum. Once you hit four figures you are just making a political statement and not a very smart one. Keep it simple, small, something you can keep track of with no more than a few sheets of paper. At least until you surpass the Heavenly Realm.”
Oh my heavens. Can he take you on as a disciple? Zihao, you must work hard!
“Of course, these are mostly external means, not truly proof of reaching the peak. A real expert can slay above their realm through mastery of their techniques. It is always unreasonably dangerous, of course, and special steps must be taken to put the Earthly person in range of the Heavenly one. It is, however, doable.”
Tian vividly remembered the heavenly tribulation that came for Brother Fu when he pulled it off, and said so. “The heavens send a tribulation if you manage it, though. It is clearly heaven defying.”
“It does do that, yes. And it is.” Voidcatcher’s voice took on an odd tone. “We are getting too far afield from what I agreed to teach you. Let's end this line of inquiry with… the Heavens are mighty, but there are heavens above heavens, laws above laws. What you think of when you think of the Heavens… isn’t exactly right. There is a reason… I won’t say more. If you want the Heartbells, square up. Otherwise, get back to eating. Just a couple more days and we will begin medicine formulation!”
Grandpa Jun’s chuckle was particularly dark. Oh my. I wondered, once I saw Liren. I thought I had just gotten lucky for once.
“Grandpa?”
Ever notice how cultivators keep banging on about following the will of the heavens, or heaven’s law, or unifying heaven, earth and man, that sort of thing?
Tian felt a momentary surge of indignation on behalf of all his fellow daoist cultivators, but controlled it. “Yes. It’s pretty core to the whole thing.”
So why do the really old, strong bastards keep referring to cultivation as something heaven defying? Why do the strongest cultivators get attacked by heavenly tribulations if they are more in tune with the will of the heavens than their more garbage tier contemporaries?
Tian shoved a plant into his mouth and took the collapse of his muscles as an opportunity to think for a moment on what Grandpa was asking. He really didn’t have a good answer.
They were above the clouds, this high up on the mountain. Tian couldn’t rely on the rainy season to mark the passage of time. The sun rose, set, and rose again, one day much like another. He started learning how to formulate medicines. Medicinal tisanes to start with, then pastes.
His cultivation raced forward. He never seemed to be over-full of vital energy. His body always had more room within. He had the growing concern that he had somehow been starved of qi down below, that it was simply impossible to gather enough energy to drive his endlessly refined body with the thin air of the low country.
On a very ordinary day, Tian sat on the porch of the guest house and looked into the achingly blue sky. He would step into that sky very soon, he knew. Their birthdays hadn’t come round again, but he had a nagging feeling that it wasn’t too far off. Neither was the Heavenly Realm. He had been suppressing his cultivation, waiting for Liren to catch up. Today, she had.
You couldn’t predict a revelation, and you certainly couldn’t demand one. But staring up into the blue sky, he felt it coming like the wind before the rain. Coming not in weeks or days but hours or minutes. He stretched his hand out to Liren, who took it with more confidence than she would have had a year ago. They didn’t say anything. They just waited. Ready to fight the heavens, together.