Liren practically levitated out of the bed as soon as Tian opened his eyes. She was at the door by the end of the first blink, and through it before he could start the second. Tian laughed silently. Small steps. One after the other. They had eternity to figure things out.
Though, he really didn’t feel like waiting an eternity. Maybe it was the yang qi, or maybe it was just being twenty, but Liren was giving him a hunger that food wasn’t filling. Tian could endure hunger, but he didn’t like it.
He sat up. His wounds were healed enough that he could move around without too much difficulty, though he wouldn’t want to fight or run flat out. He still had the swordsman’s storage ring. Time to investigate.
The first thing that caught his eye was the sword the swordsman had been carrying. It looked quite fine- not excessively decorated and clearly well used, but the decorations it did have were tasteful and elegant. In Tian’s admittedly ignorant opinion, it was the pride and joy of someone who took their swordsmanship seriously.
He waved it through the air a couple of times. Gave it a few experimental chops.
The sword was back in its scabbard and tossed unceremoniously back into the storage ring less than a minute after it was drawn. It just wasn’t for him. He had no foundation in swordsmanship, and it just felt wrong in his hands. It would doubtless fetch a good price, or perhaps they could swap it for something actually useful. Armor, maybe. He was suddenly very interested in this “soft armor” he kept hearing about. It would be a fine thing to load up on lots and lots of that.
He pulled out the sword the swordsman had been flying around on. This was a comparatively more crude sword, simply adorned, with an unusually wide blade. Tian lifted it with a grunt and examined the edge. It had been properly beveled and ground down, but the edge itself was dull. Bright, shiny, and dull. No nick marred the surface of the sword, no scrape or any indication that it had ever been used for its apparent purpose of being a sword. There wasn’t even a scabbard to go with it.
“It couldn’t be a sword just for flying on, could it?” Tian murmured. It seemed insane, but on the other hand, what would you stand on if you had to fight with the sword you were flying around on? Though he now took a very dim view of the whole notion of a “Heavenly Realm Swordsman.” Darts with extra steps. Simply darts with extra steps, and if the gallant swordsmen couldn’t accept that, then he would happily prescribe therapeutic boots to the head until they learned.
He stowed the sword and pulled a small stack of books and manuals from the ring.
“Rising Dragon-Phoenix Rankings- Wasteland of Song Region. Mmm? What’s this?” Tian opened the slim volume and started flipping through. His eyes quickly started bugging, and he bit his lips to keep from yelling for Liren.
“Heavenly Note Sung, Heaven Realm (Middle Division) (Unranked): Direct Disciple of the Regional-Class Ancient Crane Monastery, she is possessed of both beautiful looks and a beautiful voice. This is in service of her zither spells, which have reached minor completion. Believed to be on Ancient Crane Mountain behind their mountain protecting formation.”
“Wandering Sword Fei, Heaven Realm (Middle Division)(Rank: 1,002): Direct Disciple of the Regional-Class Sword River Sect, sword cultivator. Possessed of a heroic mein, his three foot sword cuts through all confusion. Believed to have achieved both one-with-sword and world-as-sword, despite being less than five hundred years old.
Tian flipped to the back, then jumped back to the front.
“Heavenly Demon. Heaven Realm (Peak) (Rank: 1): Affiliation unknown, cultivation art unknown, name unknown, all that is known for certain is that the Heavenly Demon is seven feet tall, possessed of unearthly beauty, and impossible strength for his realm. His desires are immense, his mood capricious, and his hunger for slaughter unmatched. His well of qi seems nearly infinite, as does his vital energy. There are no known survivors of any attempt to fight him. He has successfully defeated three Human Realm experts, killing two. Because of this, his battle record would usually not qualify him for a place on the rankings, due to exceeding the limit.
As a public service, the Editors and Publishers have decided to keep him perpetually at the peak of the rankings as a warning to the Wasteland of Song. Heavenly Demon is the most dangerous being below the Human Realm in the Wastelands. If you see him, don’t try to run. Forget the bounty. Just give him what he wants. Don’t invite calamity on your family, friends and sect. Last seen by the sole survivor of Golden Reeds Castle in the Green Dragon Nation, who screamed out who was responsible for the unspeakable nightmare within before she tore her own head in half.
“Ahah. Well. That’s alarming.”
Tian quickly flipped through the book, finding a few of the direct disciples from Ancient Crane Mountain listed in the book, but no one he particularly knew. Interestingly, there were no members of the Inner Court or the Core Disciples listed. Perhaps the difference made by the Skytreading Art was just that big.
“I wonder what “Middle Division” means. Middle of the Heavenly Realm? But Teacher didn’t mention anything about sub-realms. Just accumulation and one big transformation at the end.”
He set aside the books for a moment. He needed to calm himself for a moment, ultimately opting for the soothing power of greed.
There were roughly two thousand spirit crystals stored in the ring. Even with the money given to him by Voidcatcher, that wasn’t a small sum. There were also numerous pills, but from what he could tell, they were intended to either help gather qi, releasing qi in the pill for absorption, antidotes, and a few whose exact purpose he was unsure of as they contained a number of seemingly contradictory qi within them. They smelled nice, at least. Mildly floral, with notes of burnt honey. Despite that, he would swear they were both a narcotic and a stimulant. Bizarre.
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He set them aside and checked out the sundries. To his delight, the swordsman had several barrels of water in his ring, all at the Heavenly Realm. He also had a few large tea cakes, well pressed and wrapped in colorful paper. It was a little hard for Tian to tell just what they were from looking at them, but at a guess, white tea, and possibly Harmony Village tea. He was fairly sure they weren’t red teas. To his utter delight, one sealed jar was full of tightly rolled little leaves. Also clearly tea, but of a sort he was unfamiliar with.
“Treasures, treasures! Now these are true treasures!”
He looked around the ring in hopes of more joy, only to feel his mood plummet.
“Disgraceful. Such good tea, and such lousy snacks. Completely indulgent. These would ruin the palates of everyone who ate them.” There were sweets. Little bean cakes, honey soaked pastries, even boiled, sweetened dough soaked in syrup and carefully preserved. The candied haws seemed almost dignified by comparison, and the obviously much neglected haw flakes a mere cover for the sugary slaughterhouse of flavors favored by the idiot swordsman.
There was not, Tian noted with a hanging judges’ finality, a single rice cracker to be found in the whole of the storage ring. Death wasn’t too good for the idiot swordsman. It was exactly right.
With a final harumph, he started investigating the rest of the sundries. Good food, lucky that. Good supply of charcoal and firewood. No boat, which was a shame. A rather decent tent. Very decent, in fact. Big enough for two, or even three if they were particularly well acquainted. It wasn’t optimized for the Wastes like their small, low slung tents. This emphasized comfort and luxuriousness. Worth trying out, definitely. Teaware and camp knives, good quality but nothing special. He’d ask Liren to sell them. He couldn’t feel any connection to them, and they would taint his tea service.
He couldn’t put it off any longer. He went back to the books.
“Mmm. Radiant Sun Supreme Yang Sword Spell… Advertising nonsense if I ever heard it. Worthless, sell. Chess Sword Tactics… do they just lump words together and act like it means something? Maybe they just toss a bunch of characters in a cup, shake ‘em up like dice and whatever rolls out is the name of the art. Or spell, or whatever. Another one to sell. Heavenly Eye Earth Piercing Spell. Sounds like a perception art. Worth investigating. Supreme Yang Kidney Nurturing Art… wasn’t the sword spell also called supreme yang? Surely they both can’t be, right? Are they part of a set? And why would a young man need to nurture his kidneys? Did he have a health problem or something?”
Tian, whose background was almost entirely in battlefield medicine, with barely a year’s exposure to normal hormonal balance, possessed of a godly pair of kidneys after many rounds of tempering and refinement, and still a somewhat contented virgin, shook his head in utter bafflement. “Well, hopefully he will be in better health in the next life. What else was there?”
The last book was also the most worn. The cover was smudged and stained, the corners worn down, and the thread binding it was starting to fuzz. It would need rebinding soon, he guessed. Stamped on the cover, the characters fading from black to grey, were the words Introduction to Sword Flight.
Tian stared at the cover. He made a little growl of frustration, then started to read.
It took Liren a suspiciously long time to return with breakfast. By the time she did, Tian was buried deep in the text, muttering furiously.
“It’s aesthetics. It’s for the damn look of the thing!”
“What? What is?” Liren’s eyes widened as she carried a tray into the room.
“The flying sword! According to this, your real-deal sword cultivators didn’t bother standing on the sword. At least, not originally. They just drew the sword from their waist, thrust it up into the sky,” Tian mimed the action, “and flew off. They could just hang on to their swords and fly wherever they needed to go.”
“Alright?”
“Imagine it for a second. Imagine what it would look like if, say, Brother Kong was racing across a sky, robes fluttering around him, as he hung onto his sword. Knuckles presumably whitening on the hilt as his mustaches flapped around. I mean, I’m just assuming here. He does seem to love his sword. Maybe he would enjoy the experience.”
“Hard to maintain a dignified appearance.” Liren smiled with the easy satisfaction of someone who never used a sword, and never would.
“Then there is the fighting side of things. Remember how that guy stood on his sword and controlled it with his mind? It was like he replaced all his footwork with moving the ground he was standing on.”
Liren took a moment to parse that, then nodded. “Yeah, the sword was basically like a platform or a boat. The shape was basically irrelevant.”
Tian nodded, hand held up the flying sword. “This is not a sword.”
“Two edges, a point, a hilt and a guard, but not a sword.” Liren set the tray on the little table in the room, and carried a bowl of congee over to Tian.
“Thank you. Breadsticks?”
“Afraid not, but they put some white fish and plenty of vegetables in the congee. Quite fancy, I thought.”
Tian agreed, and put his spoon to work. It was good. “It is not a sword. It is a sword-shaped flying platform. So-called flying swords are built to gather qi efficiently and generate lift, requiring little extra qi from the user. Most of the spell deals with things like navigation, and not falling off as you move around on it.”
“Makes sense. You want to keep it and use it?”
“Not at all. But yes. At least until we can get something proper like a boat.” Tian sighed. “According to the manual, they tend to be pretty fast once you get the hang of it. We aren’t in any particular rush, but I think our honored teachers would be less than amused if the people we were sent to collect and protect died while we loafed around on the river.”
Liren’s spoon stopped in the air with a jerk, the congee nearly escaping her. “Right. Not the most patient or forgiving souls, I would say.”
“Not so much, no.”
The two shared a deep sigh, then Tian scooted over and patted the spot next to him on the bed. Liren’s shoulders momentarily sagged, but she squared them again and sat. They read the worn book together. Tian carefully kept a little frown on his face the whole time. Completely failing to hide the fact he was delighted to have her warmth against his side.