Tian watched Liren race around the house with helpless amazement. It looked like he wouldn’t be able to repeat his race victory, though that probably wasn’t the most important thing at the moment. Liren, in addition to being ferociously strong, was now ferociously fast.
Until she tripped over her own feet, and lay sprawled in the dirt. It took her a few seconds to stand up, and when she did, she looked ready to fall right back down again.
“Zihao. Tea. Please.”
“Have a seat, I’ll fix you a cup or three. Let me guess, you can turn your fire qi into… what, energy in your legs that makes you go a lot faster?” Tian set out his tea set, deciding to celebrate their breakthrough with some recently acquired Heavenly Realm water and the last bit of Suneater’s white tea. He would have to source new leaves, now. A happy problem.
“I’m still not clear on the details, but I think that’s right.” She sat on the porch with a thump.
“And you forgot that while Yang qi is fast, it doesn’t last.”
“Yeah.”
“And that you just broke through, and your body is still converting your vital energy into qi and back again.”
“Is it doing that?”
“Yep.”
Liren nodded, managing to look sage as she was doing it. Then undercut the image by saying “I had no idea. I just thought you broke through and that was that.”
“Not so much, it seems.” He poured the wash over his tea pets, and nearly dropped the teapot when they seemed to shiver into life. It was only for a moment, then they were still again, firmly securing his tea tray. The tray, likewise, was a blaze of colors, rioting and brilliant.
“Did… did your tea pets just move?”
“Oh thank heavens. I thought I was going crazy, but it was just you.” Tian sighed with relief, then grinned and ignored Liren’s glower. “No idea what’s going on there, but apparently this is how you raise them. I guess we will just have to wait and see. Here. Your very first cup of Heavenly Realm tea. I’d like your opinion.”
She sniffed at him, smiled, took an appreciative sip, and spat the tea out in a violent mist over the grass.
“TIAN ZIHAO!”
“What? What did I do?!”
“You need to get yourself under control is what you need to do! You can’t just, just, just…” She was blushing furiously, refusing to look at him.
“Just what? I made it the way I always do.” Tian had a hangdog look on his face. He had been trying to do something nice, and now he was getting yelled at and his best tea got spat over the grass. That was the first cup he had served in the Heavenly Realm. The very first.
“You put your understanding of the elements in it. Which includes your emotions related to that element.”
“Yes?”
“YES?!” She swung around and stared. He stared back. Eventually she closed her eyes, still blushing.
“Fire. Passion. Love. When you think of fire, you think of me, now. And… and it seems that whatever was still broken in you is completely fixed. I noticed you got the rest of your fingers back. Sorry, I didn’t say something before and I should have. Congratulations, Zihao. I am so happy for you I could scream. But you were always so cool about everything, and it’s just a lot being hit by everything that had been building up inside of you.”
Tian smiled and bowed his head.
“Make me another cup, please. The exact same way.”
Much later, Tian did his own racing around the house. Faster, but not able to fly. He would need a special tool for that- a flying boat, or a raft, or, ugly thought, a sword. Flying on Burning Heaven was much, much better. Still. Might be wise to secure a flying tool, just in case she wasn’t around.
He switched over to Moon Crossing the Lake, and for a moment, he forgot how to think. How to breathe. He felt like he was the moon, and the grass swaying in the night wind was the lake. He drifted across, not leaving a footprint, or even bending a blade. Untraceable as the moon over the water.
The next part of the art was a water escape art. He didn’t know how it worked, but he had the manual, and he had time. Centuries. With his wood cultivation and vast vital energy, maybe a thousand years.
He was… not quite twenty one.
The thought made him dizzy. He wasn’t quite twenty one. Twenty one out of a thousand. If you could put twenty five times into a hundred, and a ten hundreds went into a thousand, he had only lived one fiftieth of his total possible lifespan.
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Or he could be killed by an outraged senior in the next instant, but… a potential lifespan of a thousand years, and he had only lived a fiftieth of it. Insane. What an insane thought. If he was a mortal, he’d be a third of the way through his life. Sixty years was better than many. If a mortal reached seventy, they could say they lived longer than most. Once Tian turned sixty, he’d have lived three fiftieths of his life.
He laughed, silently, panting. He called out his Heavenly Swallow darts, and with a flick of his hand he sent them flying. With a flick of his will, he returned them to his hand. He had cultivated nine darts in the Earthly Realm, just waiting on the tenth dart to achieve minor completion. It was the last one Sister Lin had prepared for him back in the Redstone Wastes, from the near-invisible caterpillar creature. In the Earthly Realm, he had to jab them into his body at highly specific acupoints at the just-right time on the just-right days.
Now? He held up the needle, invisible in the moonlight, but entirely visible to his senses. He was starting to get a feel for why Heavenly Realm people always seemed a few steps ahead. The world was so alive, full of life and movement. There were patterns to it, eddies and flows to the qi. It wasn’t static. The world was swimming in qi, filled with the energetic air that filled him.
He marveled at it all, then looked at that last dart. He poured his qi into it, then pricked his finger and let a drop of blood fall on the needle. He could see the blood flowing inside of it, becoming part of the needle and forming the microscopic channels that bound the needles to him as tightly as his new fingers.
Ten fingers. Ten needles. He felt a throb of power, and couldn’t restrain himself. He flung out the Heavenly Swallows then chased after them. The darts twisted around him, rising and falling like swallows hunting insects at sunset, rushing with him as he danced across the grass. His white hair shone in the moonlight, floating behind him. A true mountain spirit, loose on the winds and drunk with the joy of the world.
When he could settle himself down, he took a look at the rewards from the sect. The new robe was very fine. A Core Disciple robe, he noticed, though he didn’t think it was a slight. What else could he be, if he wasn’t directly someone’s disciple? He was pretty sure he had never seen two Direct Disciple robes that were identical. Maybe they were made custom for each wearer.
He rubbed his head, thinking things through. He’d have to return the old robes, of course. If there was someone raising silkworms on the mountain, he didn’t know who they were. He always took very good care of his robes, so they were in excellent shape. They would be useful to someone, someday. He nodded, satisfied, and moved on to more trivial matters like his first specifically Heavenly Realm spells.
The first thing he noticed about them was that they weren’t arts. They were specifically called spells. What the distinction was, he wasn’t entirely sure. It didn’t make sense that it was a matter of using qi externally. They were certainly magical enough. One was a basic perception art that also allowed for two people in the Heavenly Realm to speak to each other over long distances. Very convenient. Another was for cleansing the body, a third for making clothes as clean as could be. The last spell was the most interesting to Tian, because it seemed very related to shen- a spell for keeping your thoughts inside your skull.
No need to hesitate, he was tired of having his thoughts read. The spell was seemingly straightforward. Qi rose out of the Middle Dantian and was projected around the head in a sort of bubble, each portion extruding from an accupoint, and sealing together into a seamless whole once the qi left the body. Straightforward, but not simple. Or, at least, not easy. He soon found that controlling the flow of qi precisely required an entirely new set of instincts and skills.
Qi, he learned, was “playful.” Sometimes it acted like blowing smoke, other times like flowing water. It was never still, and seemed to change the rate it moved on a whim. Guiding it through his meridians was surprisingly challenging. He had been doing it for half his life with vital energy. Qi was more unruly.
“Grandpa, any advice?”
Yes. My advice is figure out the spell yourself. Once you can cast it, you will knock the cost of upgrading it down to next to nothing. It’s a sixth rate spell, barely worthy of the name. A few tweaks won’t make that much of a difference, and the price reflects that. What it will do is teach you the difference between a good spell and a bad one. I will say that you have some hints already.
He did? Tian tried to think what they might be. Grandpa had talked to him about qi generally, but specifically?
Qi was energetic air. Energetic meant what it said, presumably, but what about “air?” It wasn’t literally air (except in the cases where it was, but that was cultivation for you) but air was in most things so it kind of worked as a metaphor.
Tian still struggled with metaphors. He poked at the word, ordering it to do something, connect to something useful. It did not.
He sprawled on the bed and stared at the ceiling. It remained white plaster. No help there.
Air. Air is… no particular element. Hmm. Well, neither is qi, exactly. It can be elementally aspected, fire qi, water qi, hell, it could have tea qi but the aspect and the qi were two different things. Qi came first in the creation of the universe. First the dao, then yin and yang, then the three qi, then the five elements, then the whole rest of the universe. So “air” by itself wasn’t qi, but it could be mixed… Ah!
He sat up. Wood! Wind was of the wood element, as was lightning! What had more energy than lightning? Now, obviously qi wasn’t all wood aspected, but maybe it could be a way of picking apart the metaphor. Energetic air. Lightning was sky fire, sort of half way between wood and fire, one of the purest expressions of yang. Particularly in the spring, as spring lightning was associated with dragons.
Was the qi his body produced fundamentally yang? That vaguely tickled a memory, or a connection. The body was earthly, fleshy, inherently yin even if parts of it were yang. Qi, the dantians and the meridians were the balancing yang.
He dug out his medical textbooks and confirmed his recollection. Yes, the qi production system was inherently yang, to the fleshy body’s yin. He closed the book with a snap and a gleam in his eye. It is yang, and behaves like wind and lightning. He could work with that.
He visualized the qi rushing up through his body like a rising spring breeze, and then crackling over his head, the qi spreading like reaching tendrils of lighting through the clouds. The threads of qi burrowed out of the acupoints in his skull, reached up and knotted to each other when they touched, binding into a coherent whole. The spell came together fast. Very fast. He barely kept the qi from slipping out of control and rupturing something. But he managed it.
Tian could feel a sudden cessation of pressure he hadn’t been aware of. A peaceful, relaxing sensation poured down on him from the spell overhead. An easy extra comfort. It also meant, he hoped, that he no longer had to worry about his seniors eavesdropping on him. He could speak truly privately, now. Tian couldn’t help but start to laugh. He had cast his first spell in the Heavenly Realm, and it was telling the world to keep a respectful distance.
“Grandpa, you really did a good job naming me!”