“Do you see the group below? See how they are riding hard across grassland?” Liren asked.
Han nodded. The group was making for a stream ahead. Tian hoped enough water was flowing through it, or they would have to take turns drinking. That many humans and horses could drink a lot of water. The sun was setting. Maybe they would make their camp by the stream.
“Let me introduce them to you. They are… I guess you could call them a potential future.” Liren’s voice was steady, matching the tempo of her rowing.
Han looked questioningly at her.
“Have you sparred recently?” She asked. He nodded. “I bet you are a whole lot stronger, not to mention more capable. Startlingly stronger compared to when you fought the Yuu on the road to Burning Flag City.”
Han nodded, his head jerking up and down.
“Far more so than someone of your age and background ought to be. Someone with decades of cultivating internal energy, perhaps, and with the sort of physique that comes from a lifetime of honing your body.” Han went still, and looked pensive.
“Power, Student Han. We have given you power. Not unlimited or godly power. A good crossbow volley would see you dead. For that matter, so would a well aimed brick. But certainly enough power to make you dangerous on the battlefield or in a back alley. Depending on how you use that power, there could be more or less people like the ones you are going to meet, and more, or less, of them might be from the Broadsky Kingdom. You now have the power to make considerably more choices than most.”
Tian thought Liren looked increasingly like the Queen Mother of the South as she explained things to Han. Remote, indifferent, seemingly cool eyes looking down on the world, even as she revealed the compassion within.
She guided their boat down to the far side of a hill a mile from the resting band. “Though, having said all that, I will not allow sentiment nor fear of my teacher prevent me from tearing you into seven pieces if I ever hear you took a slave.”
Han went pale, then beat his chest and firmly shook his head. Liren smiled thinly and turned her attention back to landing the boat. It was her first time, and it was a bit fiddly. Tian spotted Han counting the joints on his fingers, and turned pale again. This time it was Tian’s turn to smile thinly. He had already told Han what would happen if the youth disgraced his teachings. He had no intention of repeating himself.
“I saw some horsemen in the distance. Brother Zihao and I will go check them out. If they are Yuu, we will murder their shaman and steal their horses. If not, we’ll leave them be. You stay put, and keep out of sight. But do take the opportunity to sneak up on the fleeing former slaves. Your teachers are good at straight up fights and sudden assaults. Sneaking around really isn’t a strength of ours. You will have to study on your own.”
Tian frowned. “It’s a damnable weakness, now that you say it. I recall the heretics had some concealing arts on them, but none seemed worth the effort to learn.”
“It wasn’t worth it in the Earthly Realm, but we aren’t in the Earthly Realm. Heavenly cultivators seem very capable of hiding themselves. It’s kind of dumb not to have our own spells for that.” Liren gathered the cloud around the boat and lifted up off the grass. Her wooden pole found purchase on empty air, and with a strong push, she sent them soaring into the sky.
“I’ll take another look, but the ones that seemed effective were too immoral and heretical to be worth considering, and the ones that were vaguely acceptable were only slightly better than useless. At least, I don’t remember a heretical concealing art that was worth a damn at the Earthly Realm, and we haven’t fought all that many Heavenly heretics. That mantis heretic didn’t even have a concealing spell on him, because he had forged his whole body to be the spell.”
There is an opportunity for you here, Grandson.
“Oh? Is one of them better than I thought?”
No, they are all sub-garbage grade. Garbage having once been useful, and these never were. However, they are so aggressively simple that their mechanisms are easy to study and easy to find the problems with. This isn’t like your palm skill or staff skill that you are making, you have a foundation for those and higher expectations. This is one step up from refining that boy’s evasion skill. All you are aiming for is a usable, unranked level skill. Low pressure, low stakes. Just something that you made, is suitable for you, and works.
“I feel like I’m spreading myself thin.” Han found the thought a little ridiculous, but he really was trying to juggle too many things.
Refining your own spells is a really important skill to learn. As your cultivation gets stronger and stronger, there are going to be fewer and fewer suitable skills because your dao and nature will become more set. Eventually, every serious cultivator winds up making their own. Better you have an early foundation in this, than trying to learn it later when everything is more complicated.
Tian sorted through the concealing arts. They were a mish-mash of upsetting pictures and lurid language, spending excessive time talking about tigers in the jungle, or the coloration of certain insects that lived in the desert. There were a few interesting nuggets buried in there, however, and one phrase in particular caught his attention- “Converging your breath.”
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Which, on the surface, sounded like gibberish. When he picked at it a bit, it made a little more sense. Your vital energy, and by extension your qi, was constantly leaking out of you. He imagined it was a bit like the way he smelled like lotuses, or other people got body odor. It just happened, and had a distressing way of radiating. Most of the spells emphasized covering it up, trying to make an unwashed bum smell like a rose. And, as with body odor and perfume, it didn’t work and tended to make you twice as smelly. However, converging your breath was different. What if you just… stopped the smell from reaching other people? What if you could trap your odor against your skin?
Tian tapped his finger against his lip. It wouldn’t stop anyone actively looking for him, nor would it make him invisible or anything, but it would make him much harder to discover passively. His presence would not, of itself, alert people. That was worthwhile.
“Oh, it’s the White Horse cavalry. Looks like a heavy patrol. Isn’t that the captain?”
“He didn’t go back with Hanshen?”
“Apparently not.”
The troopers rolled across the grassland at a slow trot, the kind of pace they could, and had, keep up all day with regular breaks. It seemed they were headed for the creek too.
“How far are we from Burning Flag City? For people on horseback, I mean?”
“Far enough that they won’t be getting back tonight. They are probably going to make camp too. They'll spot the escapees soon. I wonder how they are going to handle things. On the one hand, who doesn’t want a ton of horses and motivated potential recruits? On the other hand, the city doesn’t have a lot of spare food, and horses eat even more than people.” Liren tapped her finger against her lip.
“Ever wanted to own a horse? I could see you looking very galant, dashing across the steppes, spear under your arm, as your glittering “Hero” headband catches the late afternoon sun. Your shimmering golden robes blazing in the light.” Tian smiled as he reclined against the bow of the boat.
There was a long silence. “No, no that would be silly. We can fly. We just got a flying boat. Even if I had a horse that could run across the sky, with blazing hoofs leaving flaming hoofprints in the air, possibly while trailing a banner of some sort…” Liren’s voice trailed off.
“No need to worry about me, I’m flying on the back of Burning Heaven in this scenario. Ah, it seems the troopers spotted the escapees and are going to investigate. Do you think Han will make contact?”
“No choice, they spotted him instantly. We really are terrible at hiding. I’m starting to question how effective our ‘mortal’ disguises are.”
“Fair.” Tian closed his eyes again, letting Liren steer the boat away from the gathering.
“I told Little Han to get to know the troopers and the escapees. All good learning experiences. And I reminded him to make good friends with the Captain of the White Horse Fellows. I think I remember him being the son of the White Horse General, which puts him high, high up.” She pulled a couple of jars of wine and some food from her ring, and focused. They floated down to the ground, tucking themselves under a myrtle bush. “There. Now he has excellent friend-making tools.”
“Hey, you are pretty good at that!”
“Practice. And don’t worry, it’s all mortal stuff.”
They spent the night patrolling, hunting for heretics or shamans and finding neither. The Yuu could cover a lot of ground in a hurry if they were motivated, and the heretics even more, but it looked like the group would make it to the nearest border fort, and from there, Burning Flag City. It was another week or more until they were off the steppes, but the chances of getting picked off by the Yuu would drop with every mile.
Tian spent the night picking apart the spells, discarding nearly every word. Really, only the concept of “converging the breath” was useful. He was already used to drawing in atmospheric qi. How hard could it be to draw in his own qi?
Both hard and not hard, it turned out. Grandpa asked leading questions, and guided his thoughts. Tian initially had the idea of the Kun sucking in water, drawing in all the qi around him, but nearly as quickly discarded it. Those breaths were powerful and highly visible, disturbing the qi all around him. What he wanted was softness and subtlety. He could try to bind his qi inside of himself with more qi, but that quickly got exhausting, and wasn’t very effective. He had the feeling that while the most stale qi exited the body with his breath, his whole body radiated it to some degree. No wonder “preserving qi and vital energy” was emphasized so much by cultivation manuals! Simply existing caused it to leak away into the atmosphere.
Instead, he opted to be like the ground. Things rose up, but they always fell back down again, pulled in by the yin qi of the earth. A gentle pull, encouraging things to naturally not fall, or if they did, not fall far, and return to where they came. The acupoints he needed to run his qi through were relatively few and simple, the flow utterly uncomplicated. He really wasn’t trying to do much.
He was startled from his reverie when Liren yelped. “Zihao?!”
“Eh? What? What?”
Liren’s shoulders slumped for a moment, her posture going loose. “Good, good. I couldn’t feel your breath for a moment. I could see you, but not feel you.” She pressed her hand to her chest and made a face. “I do not like that spell.”
“Sorry. I’m afraid I’m going to treasure it, though. It’s the very first spell I made myself.”
Liren blinked, then blinked again. “You made that?”
Tian explained how the spell worked. Liren shook her head with a smile, and laughed. “You made a spell for being still, quiet, dense and collapsing. A yin man for sure!”
She found it considerably less funny when she tried to run the spell herself. Apparently, her qi was more rebellious and excitable than Tian’s. Tian considered his qi to be irritatingly disobedient and in need of constant herding, so he could only imagine how Liren was suffering.
They spent a couple of days making wide circles around the escapees. In part to let Han reconnect with the realities of mortal life for a bit, and in part because they really did have too many things to do. They were buried in manuals, cultivating, practicing their martial arts; for daoists who notionally prioritized stillness and action with the least effort, they were wearing themselves out.
It didn’t take too long to do a few circuits around Burning Flag City each day. That was really the only thing that gave them enough time. That, and there just wasn’t much to do in each patrol. The Yuu that were coming were traders. The tribes were staying far away. Word had gotten around. It had even reached the Captain of the White Horse Company.
Everyone knew that when the Yuu came, it would be in full force. This was merely a few extra moments to prepare. So the Captain, a young man full of both romance and vicious determination, decided what he really needed was to catch the red horse spirit running around outside Vermilion Bird Fort. What could be better war preparation than security a perfect war horse? Tian and Liren sent Han with him. Trawling wasn’t turning up anything useful. Time to see what a lure could fish up.