“A job that will only take a minute, Teacher?” Tian asked, all wide eyed innocence.
“Not much more than a minute, in the grand scheme of things. Considering the totality of the dao and the cycle of the universe. Do pay attention. You can’t always rely on a handsome face and quick wit to get you out of trouble, Young Tian.” Voidcatcher wagged a webbed finger at him.
Tian bowed apologetically. “Your student will remember!” He held the bow a moment longer, then looked up. “I’m being sent to my death, aren’t I?”
“Nonsense. If you volunteer, it won’t be me ‘sending you’ but you ‘courting death.’ And not just you. Your dao companion too.”
Tian thought that sounded much more plausible. “Teacher is a master of eloquence and vivid insight, Student is not his match. Could you just elaborate on what this… fun and exciting opportunity is?”
Merciless chuckled. It might not have been intended to be a menacing chuckle. “He didn’t say it was fun or exciting. Although I suspect it will certainly be exciting.”
Tian bowed politely to the monstrous elder. Auspicious beast or not, the Xiexi scared him.
“At our stage of cultivation, it is inconvenient for us to rush out of the Holy Land and take care of things on our own in the Low Country. That is what disciples are for, or in our case, students.” Voidcatcher was maintaining his genial voice. The hairs on the back of Tian’s neck, already raised, were now on full alert.
“You two are brand new sigh Heavenly Realm cultivators. Short on spirit crystals, weapons, armor, medicine, arts, everything.” Voidcatcher’s voice got even more genial, verging on chummy.
“Let me give you something in the way of a free tip. Just to continue being a good person after letting you cultivate in my garden. Young hero Hong, I believe you hold the money in your family? Kindly provide your husb- dao companion with a spirit crystal, and take one for yourself. Good. Now. Try cultivating your qi again.”
They did as they were told. The effect was significant. Even with the thick, qi filled air, the spirit crystals almost quadrupled their efficiency. They didn’t last long, however. Each crystal only held up for a few cycles of their arts. Once the crystals were empty, they shattered into grey powder. Tian and Hong shared a long, speculative look.
It really was easy to understand their seniors, once they stood in their shoes. Tian was finding banditry more appealing by the minute. Grandpa’s frequent exhortations to adventure and casual reminders that “Blood lubricates wealth, and eases its slide into your purse,” now seemed even more pointed.
Voidcatcher chuckled, clearly not needing to read their minds to read their minds. “Yes, that's right. The Heavenly Realm is a mad dash for resources and accumulation, where every possible edge could mean the difference between life and death down the road. Not very far down the road either.”
He let the moment marinate. Tian sighed and cupped his fist. “What is it that we incapable students can possibly do for the honored teachers? And what shall our earnings be?”
“I have a descendant, quite distant, still living in the human realm below. I only consider those who manifest a trace of my bloodline to be a descendant, to be clear. He surely has fully human siblings.” Elder Merciless took over.
“He has no fate with immortality, though should he live through the current tribulation, he will likely achieve great things, for a mortal human. Heretics and foreign magicians are hunting him. More to the point, the people behind the heretics and foreign magicians are in the Heavenly Realm. Go kill them, see to it that he is reasonably safe from cultivators, or as safe as a mortal can be, and then you can return.”
Elder Merciless waved a paw, and a long, brutal spear landed on the ground with a thud. Tian could feel panic clawing at him at the sight of it. The spear head looked like a horn mounted on the end of a thick wooden shaft. Sheer fury boiled off it, and a desperate craving for slaughter.
“One of my old horns, shed when I was just a youth. I rewarded a student with it in the past, and they turned it into a spear. Eventually, the student died and the spear returned to me. I will give it to you in advance. You will need it.” The auspicious beast let them feel the force of his glare, nearly knocking out the two juniors. “I know you will complete the task perfectly.”
“As for myself? It seems that you only found half of my beloved disciple.” Voidcatcher sounded grimly amused by that fact. “I paid off… a certain diviner…”
Tian and Liren narrowed their eyes.
“Who is in no way related to that troublemaker Starsieve,”
They slightly relaxed, though there was still a certain tightness.
“And she determined that his other half is still in the human kingdom below, probably towards the south. Laying very low. He would be somewhere with decent qi density and notable good fortune in these unfortunate times.”
Tian nodded. “Like I said, I always liked Old Toad, and am happy to help him. Though… half?”
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“He reincarnated into two bodies, each holding a mix of his heavenly souls. Don’t worry about the technical details, you won’t touch on this stuff until you reach the Perfected Human Realm, or a bit later. Suffice to say, the cycle of reincarnation is not easily cheated, and it is not too surprising that his souls went a bit astray.”
Tian thought that sounded fair, in an insane sort of way.
“And our fee?” Liren asked.
“No payment in advance from me, I’m afraid, nor a weapon. Just a ring, a cutting and a book, yours when my beloved disciple’s other half returns to me.” Voidcatcher waved a webbed hand and behind him, a tree faded into existence. It had always been there, Tian knew. It was just that he had never noticed it before. Somehow. All hundred feet of it.
The bark was a soft sliver and brown, the leaves long ovals of lustrous emerald. The longer he looked at it, the more he was convinced there was some great secret hidden on those leaves and in the pattern of the twisting and dividing branches. Some great truth, worth more than kingdoms. The leaves rustled with the wind, and just from that gentle sound, he thought he could hear the world whispering the truth of cultivation. Then the wind carried the scent to him.
“Tea! That’s a spiritual tea tree!” Tian forgot his decorum entirely.
“Indeed! And quite an ancient one too, even for tea trees. I’m offering you a cutting, well rooted and established. I’m even throwing in the pot. The benefits for you two, long term, I trust, go without saying. I’m also including a ring that can keep plants growing well indefinitely, so long as they are occasionally watered and fertilized. Lastly, a small volume on raising tea trees, and on various ways to process tea leaves, which will take you clear through the Human realm. The yield won’t be nearly enough for you to brew with for at least a decade or two, but you will find other benefits before then.”
Tian and Liren shared a glance. “Can we bring Burning Heaven?”
“She is still studying with the Grandmaster.” Merciless chuckled. It wasn’t any more reassuring this time.
They shared another glance, then nodded. “Done. How will we know when we have found your descendant, Venerable Merciless?” Tian asked.
“He will be around a judge or magistrate, or serving a lord. Student Hong will know him on sight. The sense of kinship will be quite unmistakable.”
“Then we will have to trouble the Teachers to send us out from the mountain, as we cannot leave the ward ourselves.”
Voidcatcher snorted. “Did you think I had just forgotten about the two of you these last few weeks? You got this extended cultivation retreat because I had to negotiate with the various Holy Lands to open up a door. My poor pill warehouse is utterly devastated. It’s not exactly easy for them to seal and unseal the mountain, and the benefits to keeping the mountain sealed for a good few years are significant. And none of your business. You have an hour to get ready.”
They shared another glance and laughed awkwardly. They had their tents packed up and the garden perfectly tidy in less than twenty minutes, even brushing and raking the ground that had been flattened. The awkwardness intensified, as it turned out the one hour period wasn’t some arbitrary grace. The Holy Lands had agreed to open the mountain at a set time, which was in one hour. Forty minutes of awkwardly standing around made them quite eager to be off.
Voidcatcher threw out a leaf, which expanded until it could hold both of them comfortably. They rose up from the garden and flew out across the Myriad Colors Holy Land. Tian felt the colors and lights stabbing his eyes. It was even more beautiful when seen from the Heavenly Realm, but the intensity of it all made his eyes water. Truly myriad colors, the soft grasses in infinite shades and gradations of blues and greens and browns and purples and yellows, shading into the short shrubs and bushes, themselves soon lost in trees. All brilliant, beautiful, and, in a way he couldn’t wrap words around, right.
They reached a point in the sky that seemed no different than any other, and paused. Merciless collected their mind protecting necklaces, and the sudden influx of qi nearly knocked them out. Blurry eyes could barely make out a cloud forming in front of them. The cloud seemed to part, leaving a door in the sky. The leaf flew through the door, and out into the wide world.
It was a sublime moment. And awful.
Tian and Liren collapsed onto the leaf, gasping, panting, struggling to breathe in enough air. No matter how deep the breath, it was never enough. Hands clenched, legs thrashed and convulsed, as they took desperate gasping breaths. It got worse as the leaf descended. They were nearly unconscious by the time they landed on the ground.
“This leaf will reactivate when you return to the mountain and pour your qi into it. You aren’t dying. Your bodies are just dealing with vastly less qi than they are used to. With time, you will adjust. I recommend a day or two to acclimate. Good hunting.”
Voidcatcher’s voice echoed from the leaf, which condensed into a narrow oval barely half the size of Tian’s palm. That, it seemed, was all there was to say about that. Tian just barely heard it. The sensation of suffocating was quite hard to ignore.
It really did take them two days to acclimate.
“We used to live like this all the time. All the time. This was our normal.” Tian couldn’t lie to himself. He was moaning, lying flopped on the ground. He had strategically flopped so his head rested on Liren’s lap. She squawked, but didn’t chase him off.
“We were young and ignorant,” said the twenty year old Liren to the debatably twenty year old Zihao. “Naive about the height of the heavens and the breadth of the earth. I’d say something about a frog in a well, but I’m too tired to argue over classic sayings.”
“Wise choice. Wise choice.” Tian slightly nodded his head. He was very comfortable where he was, and didn’t want to startle her. “Though, speaking of the breadth of the earth, we need to find someone you recognize in the company of potentially any lord or judge in this kingdom. Of which, I am guessing, there are many. People who will be scattered across the entirety of the kingdom. We don’t have any flying tools, which means we are strolling at Heavenly People speed. So that’s fun.”
“Which still beats out needing to find a toad somewhere with above average qi and fortune that isn’t the mountain, location- ‘South.’ Also fun.”
She didn’t sound very broken up about it. Tian grinned. He wasn’t either. He tilted her head back and met her eyes.
“Sounds like we have every reason to run around and poke our noses into things.”
She nodded. “Never know what we might find. Bandits to exterminate, treasures to uncover.”
“Hidden grottoes to explore, heretical cultivators to slaughter. I found my Hell Suppressing Body Sutra on a Heavenly Realm Heretic. What else could they be carrying?”
“Wanna head south and find out?” She grinned.
“I do. But that’s not what our first stop should be.”
“Oh no?”
“Nope. Mountain Gate City. Time to go see how our less favored comrades are faring, along with the rest of the kingdom.” The smile faded from Tian's face. “I don’t think they will be happy to see us.”