They managed to get control of themselves somewhere near what they were pretty sure was a tributary of the Green River. They were only pretty sure, though. Based on the geography, and how green everything was, and the sheer presence of a river with real boat traffic, they had to be three or four days flight into the kingdom. Their immediate instinct was to turn around and fly back, but… to do what, exactly?
“We left Little Han a letter and the present with the City Lord, the Earthly Realm immortals destroyed the new catapults and hopefully kidnapped the designer,”
“Which turned out to not be needed.” Liren interrupted, exhausted and grumpy.
“We couldn’t have known that, and it was a last minute addition to the plan regardless. The point is that we don’t have any other business in the city. Training Han was always more of an extra service we could provide to that senior. The job was killing Threadcutter, and we’ve done that. It’s time for Han to stir out a bit. We didn’t train him to live as our servant for the rest of his life. He should go out and do things. Have adventures. Find good brothers and sisters. Find a dao companion-”
“Girlfriend. Or, possibly, wife.”
“Whatever.” Tian waved the distinction aside. “He wanted to romance beauties, befriend and battle the heroes of the age, and slay villains. If he’s not the best equipped mortal for that life, I don’t know who is. And we know he survived, because if he died and we lived, we would die too, real damn fast. Since I don’t have a feeling of inescapable doom descending on me, he lived.”
Liren nodded. Tian got the impression she would nod at just about anything right now, so long as she could sleep afterward.
“Hou doesn’t need more help, Ma can figure things out on his own, and we didn’t owe either of them anything regardless. The City Lord, City Protector and the Red Plumed General, Gongsun Zhan, all of them have their own mortal lives to lead, and the city is far more secure than it has any right to be. There is nothing left to do.”
“And the real reason?” Her eyes were half closed.
Tian fell silent for a few minutes before answering. “The soldier's eyes. Did you see them?”
“Mmm.”
“Fanatical. They were fanatical. They were ready to die for me. This is beyond establishing a new city god. This really is the seed of something huge. Potentially. And I don’t want any part of it. I don’t even want to be a sect elder. Running a cult? Absolutely not.”
“And?”
“And we need to close up for a while. Secluded cultivation. For years, honestly. Not practical just this second, but I really, truly need at least a few weeks or a month of seclusion just to figure out where we are right now, and what we need to do next. I just had a… massive… breakthrough with my staff art and my dao. Massive. I can’t even comprehend the full scope of it right now. It’s like my whole understanding of the world and my place in it just shifted slightly and all of a sudden things are making sense in a way they never did before. I need to meditate and study this. I bet you are in the same place with your spear dao.”
“Yeah. And some other things.”
Tian fell silent again. After a while, Liren said, “I don’t know how I feel. Part of it is the yang depletion, so everything seems tiring and pointless, and I know I’ll get over that soon enough. But a bigger part of it is that I have been visualizing today since I was eight years old. I didn’t know their faces, but it was still them I was stabbing when I did my spear drills. And there is still so much to fix, and a sect to reform and… and just the whole damn world, but right now there is this void in me. I climbed to the top of my mountain, and now all I can see is the things that aren’t the mountain. The big empty all around me.”
“Do you regret killing them?”
“Hell no. I’m going to burn some hell money and ask the demons to make the fires even hotter and the skewers extra pointy, just for them.” A bit of the usual spark came back in her eyes. “I just need to find the next target. The next thing to visualize. I do better with a single thing to focus on.”
That made sense to Tian. He sometimes wished his mind worked like that. It was just that the world was so interesting. There were so many wonderful things to learn about, and so many things worth doing. What was the point of an immortal life if you didn’t spend it learning and doing all the wonderful things?
“Oh wait, didn’t Threadcutter say something about a million spirit crystals and some Earth Milk? I don’t like milk, but tell me there are a million spirit crystals in his storage ring!” Liren perked up, still glassy eyed. Tian investigated the storage treasures, and sighed.
“Can you believe an arch-heretic would lie about money? Not that there isn’t an awful lot here. So much. I know these stones aren’t all exactly the same size, but it might be better to measure our wealth by weight than by numbers. Perfect accuracy is unlikely to matter, if you follow me. And I haven’t a clue what Earth Milk is, so who knows if it’s even in here.”
Liren sighed, nodded, smiled, and deflated. Her last spark of energy guttered and went out.
“We are apparently, allegedly, in the vicinity of ‘what we are hunting for.’ Let’s camp here for the night and have a search around for any ponds tomorrow.” Tian suggested.
This tale has been pilfered from NovelPhoenix. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
“You are putting up the tent. And… everything. I’m in charge of sitting here and not moving.” Liren looked like she wanted to imperiously wave him into action, but the best she could muster was a slight twitch of her fingers.
“That’s my job. You are stealing my job. Shameless. Disgraceful behavior.” Tian scolded even as he laid out the tent. It still seemed absurdly luxurious, but had become comfortable and familiar. The two had grown used to sleeping side by side. Liren made no defense to the accusation. After a few minutes, he heard her breathing change. She had fallen asleep, head resting on her knees.
It was a nice clearing they had settled into. There was a river about fifty yards away, and the return of the tall grass and bamboo was welcome. There was a freshness to the air that was quite different from the smell of the steppes. Something about that intersection of so much water and so much wood, growing so mightily and bursting with life. It all seemed so much more special, now. After most of a year out on the dry steppes, after so long under siege, it felt like life itself.
There was a parasol tree, mixed in with the other trees and bushes. Tian almost wanted to pet it, for the sheer familiarity of it all. He let the tree be. It couldn’t be good for Liren to sleep that way. He’d get her bedded down, then meditate for a bit.
“That wasn’t normal.”
No part of that battle was normal for you, no.
Tian mentally circled the qualifying term and determinedly set it aside for later. “I mean, a radical reunderstanding of my staff art, I’d swear I was using a different sort of qi, and… and I don’t even know what.”
There was an unusually long pause. Tian thought he heard a fake, ghostly, cough.
This is a little awkward.
Tian jolted out of his meditation. Grandpa? Admitting something was awkward? Was this even possible?
I may have, slightly, marginally, to the smallest measurable degree possible, understated the usefulness of merits. I believe I did mention they could assist in breakthroughs? Well, that’s what happened. Not a breakthrough in your cultivation, a breakthrough in your comprehension. Merits being merits, they do guide you in a certain direction: in this case, virtue and righteousness. Those aren’t absolute things, as you well know. You could define them as “Things in conformity with the way of the heavens and the will of Heaven generally.” This is from not too corrupted sources. Not “in conformance with the will of the Mad God,” if you like. Less personified, more rules level. In conformance with the Great Dao, perhaps.
“Damn! That's… What level is the spell now?”
It’s not really coherent enough to be considered a finished spell. More like a few good ideas smooshed together. With even a little work, you could make it a solidly third tier spell. Solid third. And that’s because you are limited by the source spells. Trim off the excess bits, develop a bit more clarity about the spell and it is an easy lower second tier. That’s miles and miles better than I hoped for initially. Well done, Grandson. The fate dragon might have pushed you into enlightenment, but it was only your hard work that let you accumulate all the pieces you needed. Your efforts did not go to waste.
There was a ghostly chuckle, only somewhat sinister. And while virtue is its own reward, allegedly, you just picked up some very, very heavy storage rings and other devices. In fact, even taking into account all the talismans you used and all the pills you ate, even if we were just talking about spirit stones, you have enough to cultivate for decades without worry. They will spend fast when you start trying to buy things, but given your shopping patterns to date, I’m not worried.
Tian silently laughed. “Can I ask you to handle the treasure hunting?”
Happy to. Someone, at least ONE PERSON, in this godsforsaken wasteland must be carrying loot worthy of the name. I refuse to believe that the entire population is nothing but broke bastards.
Tian laughed again, this time out loud, and shook his head. He was sitting on a mountain of resources, something that fired the heart of every Heavenly Realm cultivator. He had made incredible advances in the dao. He had a wolf spirit to learn about. His cultivation was far, far advanced from where it was when he left the mountain. His palm art was still, charitably, a work in progress, but that was fine. His medicine dao was likewise pretty limited, but equally, it had progressed immensely simply by virtue of being out in the world and practicing. All in all, things were looking pretty good.
Best of all, was Liren. He smiled at the tent, quiet anticipation warming him. This, too, was a joy found by struggling out in the world. Closing up with her somewhere private for the next month or three sounded very appealing. Their enemies were dead. Broadly speaking. The vendetta was buried, first by his forgiveness of Liren, then by Liren’s killing of the Longs. A thread of fate, neatly tied off.
All that was left was to find and return Voidcatcher’s student, collect their pay, and either close up on the mountain or head off for adventures in another country. Either worked. They had done more than enough for the kingdom. Breathed in far too much mortal air. All done. Time to go be mountain ascetics once more.
I must say, I am really impressed by how advanced your ascetic heart has become.
“Oh? I don’t think I have changed that much.”
Oh come on. You completely forgot about the sky barge the Long Clan came in. If that’s not thinking like an ascetic, what is?
Tian Sat and blinked for a few seconds before shooting to his feet. It was only the sleeping presence of Liren that stopped him from screaming.
“THE BARGE! We have to go get it!”
Might be a bit hard. Sweetdove has had hours to refine it. She could be almost anywhere by now.
Tian swore for a solid three minutes in his head. By the end of it, he was asking Grandpa for suggestions on profanity, as he had long since run out of his own. In the end, all he could do was silently record the grudge in his heart, and vow that her thumbs wouldn’t survive the instant he saw them.
Like most very good plans, his plan for peaceful mountain cultivation didn’t survive contact with reality. Four days after they landed in the clearing, Tian and Liren were led to a reed lined pond by the wolf spirit. Sitting in the middle of the pond was a wide, flat rock, and on top of the rock was a cultivator, and on the cultivator’s lap there was a jade try, carrying ivory figurines, carved gems, precious jades , and a single bronze toad.
All of which would have been unusual but fine under most circumstances. These weren’t most circumstances. The cultivator was seven feet tall, inhumanly beautiful, and whatever he was cultivating, his qi hammered on the air like war drums. His eyes opened when they approached the pond, and Tian saw only the indifference of a tiger within them.
“Dare disturb this Heavenly Demon while he is cultivating? You are courting death!”