They invited Sweetdove over for a cup of tea and a chat. She responded that it was an odd time for tea and a chat, to which Tian replied that she wasn’t likely to find a better one any time soon, and as someone who had spent a fair bit of their life at war, any time you weren’t fighting was an excellent time for tea. Sweetdove said she couldn’t argue with that, and that she would bring some snacks. After two rounds of a lively green tea, they set down to serious business.
“I know you said the two of you broke through without a master to guide you, but… hmm. Well. This isn’t a secret or anything, but I should say that there are a lot of competing explanations for why we all do more or less the same thing. That is, leaving mortals be, and generally keeping out of the business of Earthly Realm cultivators too.”
“Forgive me, fellow Daoist, but it seems a stretch to say we all do that.” Liren smiled thinly, then crunched some melon seeds. “Oh, these are nice. They have qi in them, may I ask where you got them?”
“Bamboo Medicine Hut has formed an agreement with the Verdant Hills Sect to share resources. I was able to purchase a few melons from one of their traveling traders a while back. The flesh of the melon is long gone, alas. No, not every cultivator has this realization, but certainly those on the orthodox path do. It usually comes around your second century. I have a hard time gauging with you two, but I suppose you are about that age, or a little younger.”
“It’s hard to guess my age?” Tian asked.
“You appear to be a youth of no more than twenty, and sometimes act that way, but your insight into the elements,” she lifted the tea cup. “Couldn’t possibly be from someone still in their first century of life. Leaving aside the sheer impossibility of so young a heavenly person.” Tian nodded genially, not mentioning that in the Ancient Crane Monastery, forty would be considered a normal age to break through for second rate talents like himself.
“Honestly, I half thought the two of you had found some sort of legendary youth reversion technique.”
“I would be very interested to see a copy of that technique, if you have one.” Tian’s fist clenched inside his sleeve.
“I would too. That’s why I said it was legendary. We are getting sidetracked. Are you at all familiar with the concept of merit?”
“Intimately.” Liren nodded.
“And the inverse? Most traditions call it sin, for lack of a better word.”
“Less so.” She shook her head. “Though I do know that it can hover over and around particularly vile heretics.”
“Just so. In the heavenly realm, merits are hard to come by, and easily lost. Sin accumulates all too easily. When too much sin accumulates, the heavens and the earth oppose you. It becomes a vicious cycle. One must do more and more desperate things to advance, but each act accumulates more sin.”
“When you say the heavens and the earth are against them, what does that mean?”
Daoist Sweetdove smiled awkwardly. “That is where I run into trouble, Daoist Tian. There is no way to measure the accumulation of merit or sin. We have to infer based on outcomes, and it is hard to differentiate between ordinary bad luck and heaven’s punishment. Likewise, as every good contains bad, and there is fortune in every misfortune, it is hard to say what counts as a true blessing.”
Liren nodded. “The poor man who discovers a jade ring and thinks himself fortunate, only to be executed as a thief by the magistrates, or murdered by bandits.”
“Hence the aphorism “An innocent man in possession of a treasure is guilty.” Sweetdove smiled with her eyes and had another sip of tea.
Tian thought that made not a single lick of sense, but kept his mouth shut.
“While we cannot measure sin and merit directly, we can infer, and we can judge by our instincts. Killing a mortal, even trying to, produces a feeling of utter revision. I haven’t experienced it personally, but I am told the lingering emotional effects of even attempting it are extremely unpleasant.” Sweetdove’s voice was slow and graceful. Tian made a third pot of tea, poured, then emptied the leaves into a bucket for disposal later. Green tea simply lacked staying power. He considered what teas he had available, and decided to switch to an ordinary, if pleasant, white tea.
“So why not balance the scales by saving another peasant? Or mortal, or whatever.” Liren asked.
“It is not so simple. Murder is plainly murder, but is saving a life truly saving a life? Remember the metaphor of the poor man with the jade ring. You may simply be leading them to an even worse fate. Dealing with unambiguous disasters is a safer bet. Diverting floods, preventing beast waves, that sort of thing. But it is only a safer choice, not a safe one. I am reminded of a dear sister who thought she was accumulating merits by preventing forest fires in the forest she harvested pine sap from to make ink.”
Sweetdove sighed. “I only found out years after she passed that some forests burn regularly, and it is necessary for the health of the forest. Her ‘meritorious act’ was simply harming nature.”
“Ah. How daoist. Best to do nothing. You might not benefit yourself, but you won’t harm yourself either.” Tian chuckled and shook his head.
“That is a popular opinion, yes. Except, you know how hard it is to gather resources at the Heavenly Level. Frankly, outside The Great Mountain and a few similar places, qi dense materials are vanishingly rare. One has to get active, decisively, ruthlessly active, to gather the things you need to progress your cultivation.”
“Ah. That explains why our Broadsky Kingdom has such a mediocre reputation for cultivation in the Righteous Alliance. We have less cultivation resources than our allies.” Liren muttered.
The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.
“I can’t speak to our reputation, but it’s not the resource shortages. The whole Wasteland of Song is extremely poor, hence the name. Every qi rich item matters, and depending on circumstances, it is often worth killing to acquire. However, the sin burden of killing a cultivator, particularly one on your level, is much less than the sin burden of killing a mortal.”
Tian nodded at that. He had certainly felt no burden killing Daoist Lian, nor that idiot swordsman from the Blazing Dawn sect. “But the Shamans are mortal, and I can’t say I have felt any negative feelings about killing them.”
“I’m not an expert, no one is, but my guess would be their power. The Heavens don’t look to one’s cultivation methods, just power. And we are in the Heavenly Realm, studying the ways of heaven after learning the ways of the earth. The shamans, particularly the grand shamans, watch the stars, perform divinations and control the weather, to say nothing of communing with mighty spirits.” She smiled. “If that is not heavenly, this little painter doesn’t know what is.”
Tian rocked back slightly, then half closed his eyes. The signature ability of those in the Heavenly Realm was the ability to use qi, the material the universe itself was made of. In a sense, that could, at a major stretch, be considered studying the ways of heaven. The other traits were detachment from the affairs of lessers, only making a move when they were sure the costs and benefits worked in their favor, and a vicious determination to seize every advantage. Even if you disregarded the latter trait as the same instinct that saw junkyard dogs fighting over a scrap of rotten meat, it didn’t sound too much like studying the heavens. Still, it sounded plausible. Coming to understand merit and sin…
“Virtue.” Liren murmured, jolting Tian out of his introspection. “If the earthly realm was about setting your feet upon the path, then the heavenly realm is about learning to walk it in accordance with the heavens, leading a virtuous life. Our daoism promotes detachment, but we believe in virtue too.”
“And while the heavens can be cruel, there are heavens above heavens, truths beyond the superficial truths we can easily see.” Sweetdove nodded slightly. “It’s why my Myriad Waters Sect focuses on painting and the arts. To teach ourselves to properly see, and once we have seen, to understand the truth behind what we are seeing.”
“Remember the Copper Roofed Inn?” Liren messaged Tian. “Or the heretic Heartmend? Compared to them, those heretics we killed recently were just cute little kids. The feeling of the sin on them was totally different.”
“We knew merit could resist tribulations. What else could it be good for?” Tian messaged back. They had a lot to think about.
There was a dry, ghostly cough.
Or he could just ask Grandpa. Once they had finished the tea, of course.
Merit and Sin? Good Boy Points from an upper level of the heavens, as nudged into place by the fate dragon of the kingdom. And “sin” is the opposite, of course.
“Wait, you can just tell me that?”
Yep.
“No energy costs? It seems really important.”
Remember what she said about resources in the Wasteland of Song?
“Yes? Oh hell, it’s common knowledge elsewhere, isn’t it?”
Correct. Fun fact- the stronger the nation’s fate dragon, the better able it is to funnel merits to its people. It can even add its own to what the upper heaven sends. That’s one of the reasons Starsieve made a point of feeding Blackiron’s Fate Dragon to the Kingdoms. Even funner fact, those same fate dragons can, if motivated, to an extent, shield someone from the consequences of accumulating sin, and block heavenly punishment.
“Things are going very badly in the Gorge, aren’t they?”
I betcha the blood never has time to dry on the flagstones before a fresh layer goes down.
“What happens to the fate dragon if, for example, the entire southern border gets conquered?”
The dragon is weakened, of course. But the fate dragon also influences the tide of war and the development of the nation.
“Is a fate dragon anything like a spirit?”
Why yes, yes it is.
“So hypothetically a Great Wolf Spirit and Great Horse Spirit could trample it and tear it apart?”
If it was weak enough.
“So the fate dragon sends merits-”
No, no, the fate dragon steers them, and can add to them, but doesn’t create or award them. Even saying steering is too much, it’s more… making them more useful or more painful. They come from a higher order system in the heavens. And that is too expensive to talk about.
“So what can I do with Merits?”
Right now? Nothing. Later? Also probably nothing. Merits are very useful for things like your children being born healthy, or you achieving enlightenment. At the highest levels, you just become incredibly lucky, and people try not to fight you. There are even special physiques that can be created when merit reaches a certain intensity, some even first rate. But that’s “Saving the world repeatedly” levels of merit. There isn’t a shop where you can trade them in or anything like that.
Tian barely heard most of what Grandpa said. “Kids born healthy. Liren and I… if we gathered enough merit, could we block the curse?”
I told you, it’s not exactly a curse.
“No, it’s the evil heavens going out of their way to hurt me. If I gather enough merits, could Liren and I get the Fate Dragon’s protection for our child?”
Ah… yes. It’s not going to keep a kid alive forever, but it will certainly block a significant degree of unjust cruelty to the baby.
“Why didn’t you mention this before?!”
Never came up. Also, candidly, I intend to guide you into becoming a being so strong, you don’t need to rely on something so unreliable as a tiny kingdom’s fate dragon or merits to protect your family. These are all nice to have now, no doubt about that, but you will get more long term benefit out of refining your own palm and staff arts.
“To hell with a palm art, do you know how TERRIFIED Liren was about our kids? It was on my mind too.”
Ah… that… is true. I am sorry, Grandson. It genuinely didn’t seem important, but I can see how it is from your perspective. I’m usually pretty on the ball about these things, but I was old when I died, and I have been a ghost for much, much, much longer than I was alive. That sort of fire in the blood is at best a distant memory.
Tian breathed out slowly through his nose, and collected himself. Seemingly irrelevantly, he asked. “Do you have a tomb?”
Not… exactly.
“Did you leave family behind? Anyone who can sweep it?”
There was a ghostly chuckle. Not bitter, or sinister, a genuine, happy chuckle. Flesh of my flesh? Not a one. Don’t pity me, Grandson, I like my existence.
Tian nodded, privately renewing his determination to build a tomb for Grandpa. Merits could let him and Liren have a healthy child. And even before that, it would make other things a lot more appealing.
He just couldn’t kill any mortals. He couldn’t interfere in the mortal battles. His battlefield would have to be the shamans, and really, just the Grand Shamans. Unless he made a choice. Should it come to it, would he accept the sin of killing an army of mortals to save Burning Flag City? Or would he let the city fall, for the chance of a healthy child?