As I pulled the bow back and forth on my erhu, I twisted the strings with my other hand and succeeded at creating a fair approximation of John Denver's famous song Take Me Home, Country Roads, while staring up into the nearly full moon with a frown on my face.
Stopping, I put the erhu into my storage ring, pulled out a small six-chord lap zither, and began plucking strings and manipulating the fretboard. The zither was much more flexible as an instrument for a solo piece, so this attempt at the song was much more recognisable, but the sweet dulcet tones didn't do a thing to remove the frown from my face.
I paused again and shifted into playing The House of the Rising Sun instead, closing my eyes and absorbing some of the Qi contained in the silver lunar light that fell within a hundred metres of my body, sitting quietly on the top of a tree, amidst the moonlight, looking like someone had dumped glitter around me from above.
In the Qi Gathering stage, my cultivation method emphasised learning set-piece dance moves and even had entire routines that it recommended one could perform to maximise the gathering of Qi.
You didn't have to dance with this technique, as I wasn't right now, but it was described as receiving the best benefits for the least effort, so I generally did. However, I wasn't satisfied with the results I was getting at the moment, either.
Once I entered the Foundation Establishment realm, the cultivation manual emphasised personal understanding and feeling of what the moon meant to you. Just doing the set-piece dance routines described in the Qi Gathering section didn't provide good effects. Instead, I was supposed to come up with my own, and as such, I attempted to use accompaniments different from the samples included in the cultivation manual, specifically songs from my old life, but the results were dreadful.
The House of the Rising Sun was a little bit better, but Take Me Home, Country Roads was so bad that I felt that I might actually suffer Qi deviation if I genuinely tried to cultivate using a dance set to it, and I was curious about why, as it had been one of my favourite songs. I finished the song and then used my hands to still the strings of the zither, preferring silence for my thoughts.
It was kind of difficult because I had never done anything with music except enjoy it before coming into this world. Well, I had learned to play the guitar in high school, but that was primarily to attract girls; I certainly wouldn't have considered myself a musician, much less an artist. Merildwen's life provided no help, either. Despite how different we were in many ways, we were actually quite similar in our preferences.
She liked wizardry, and I liked engineering, so we focused our professional efforts, if for differing reasons. When we had time off, neither of us saw the serious effort involved in music as something relaxing or fun to do, so we never really pursued it. We both preferred to read novels or similar distractions.
Humming, I thought about the lyrics to John Denver's song and was suddenly enlightened, "Almost heaven, West Virginia... The radio reminds me of my home far away..." I murmured, shaking my head. The lyrics spoke to a song of nostalgia for your home, of wanting to return. Moreover, even the composition was almost maudlin, set in A major.
Cultivation, as an activity, was something that was definitionally forward-looking. Also, cultivation was, in effect, one of the most selfish things one could do, theoretically. The entire purpose was to challenge heaven, earth and the natural order of things and declare "NO. I will not abide fading away!" You couldn't really cultivate nostalgically, and that was especially true when that nostalgia was directed towards a home you would never, ever return to.
It wasn't impossible to ever see Earth again. Just the fact that my Sendings went through to Merildwen there meant it was definitely possible to travel there in the future, either through the seventh-level conjuring Planar Shift or through Daoist methods for travelling between realms. It was possible... but would it be home if I returned? Hell, if I was being honest with myself, West Virginia hadn't been my home for years, even before I found myself in this incredible situation, to say nothing of now.
One could cultivate through the emotion of loss because although in some ways loss trapped you in the past, it also propelled you forward, and it was a very common motivation, and it was one I think Xiao Li was, perhaps, working through, but that was quite different from nostalgia. If I were being honest with myself, I didn't feel loss when I thought back about my life on Earth. All I felt was nostalgia, which told me that it wasn't really my home anymore. So it was not surprising a song titled Take Me Home, Country Roads would have a negative effect, as I was in effect, lying to myself.
Huh. I wasn't expecting to confront an interesting but suppressed truth about myself today. Honestly, perhaps it wasn't that suppressed as I had always been sceptical about isekai stories where the protagonist was obsessed with returning home.
I sat there, nestled amongst the leaves in the top canopy of a tree, concealed by my magic and played a few other songs I knew. At my current level of cultivation, I didn't think entirely with my brain anymore; part of my thinking was done with my soul now, and that made my memory incredibly good, so I could pick apart and play the melodies of most of the songs I heard in my last life.
I spent the next two hours trying an eclectic variety of songs from my past life, from Kendrick Lamar to Chopin.
It became clear that songs with lyrics were worse than songs without them, for my purposes, and I thought it was likely because lyrics were, in some ways, explicitly telling me how I should think and feel about them, whereas a symphony or purely instrumental song could be more... open to interpretations.
This made me have the idea that I might have to, eventually, write my own accompaniment in order to create my own dance routine in order to cultivate this realm, and this thought almost caused me to drop my zither, but I managed to catch it before it fell fifty metres to crash into the ground below.
Was... was I turning into a bard?! I already had a few music-based techniques to cast illusions or enchantments, especially on large groups of people... no, no, I wasn't. It was just the fastest way to cultivate. I wasn't treble-classing, honest.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the song that I thought would be most useful to me for the moment when I was dancing in the moonlight, absorbing energy, was Tchaikovsky's The Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. It was simple and easily reproduced on a zither, or I could just remember it in my head on the piano, and it gave me a good tempo to dance to.
Perhaps it was a little bit on the nose since the word Immortal was synonymous with Fairy in this new language I spoke, but my mental image of the song was of a tiny fairy drinking or absorbing magical dew from flowers in the twilight of the morning under the full moon. A little bit like I was doing? Sans the flowers, anyway.
I had the idea this song probably wouldn't have worked so well for me if I had actually ever seen the Nutcracker ballet. I hadn't and had no idea what the story was about, who the Sugarplum Fairy was or why she was dancing. I wasn't that cultured, but everyone had heard this particular song. It was a song with universal recognition, sort of like Pachelbel's Canon, Vivaldi's Four Seasons or the so-called Ode to Joy. There were tons of songs like this that were used universally as background music if nothing else. Why there were a few that were used so often that I didn't even know their name... like the "waking up to birds chirping" song used in almost every cartoon?
Anyway, the Sugarplum Fairy would work for now, and I would build a little routine around it and possibly write my own song if I ran into cultivation bottlenecks using this one, but that was for the future. Nodding, I put my zither away and ran vertically down the tree, very much like the tree-walking exercise I remembered from Naruto. It worked in a very similar way, too. I bounded from tree to tree before I eventually returned back to the ground.
As usual, Xiao Li was already awake early, and our two guests were still in a magically induced slumber. He stretched from the central area we were using to cook food and greeted me, "Good morning, Wen. Want some breakfast? How long are we going to keep these two asleep?"
Breakfast sounded great, actually, so I nodded, "Yes, please." I glanced at them and shrugged, "We can wake them today. I wanted to finish taking care of the bodies before waking them up. I didn't really want them to see me half-finished on that."
Xiao Li glanced sideways, where my working area consisted of two perfectly cleaned skeletons standing perfectly still and two more bodies lying naked, except for coins covering their eyes, on the ground. The coins were, of course, a result of casting Gentle Repose on them to stop decomposition. I had used the same spell on Xiao Li the first time I met him, although perhaps I shouldn't tell him that.
Amusingly enough, I was still using the same wand of Flay that I had taken with me in this world, and I could only use it twice a day, so unless I wanted to debone these guys manually, and I didn't, I had decided to wait until this morning.
After separating the two young master's skeletons from their meats with the wand, I carefully repaired the one I had bisected using repeated castings of the Mending cantrip and the first-level Necromancy spell Mend Bone when the damage was too much for the cantrip, and then I used Animate Dead on their bones.
I had gotten Xiao Li to incinerate the "meat" parts of their bodies and would scatter their ashes somewhere else today, but I had wanted to get them reanimated quickly. I didn't know if these young masters were important enough to have some way of detecting when they died, but if they did, then the simplest way to find them was through divinations on their blood and body.
From reading about Daoist divination, I was pretty sure that the fundamental mechanics worked similarly to those of Merildwen's world, even if the specifics of how it was carried out were different. Taking a hair or some blood and using it to find someone worked based on the fact that spirit was... liquidy... it seeped into everything, and especially your body, like your hair and blood—then like could find like through sympathetic magic. But it also even seeped into the items you carried, which was why diviners would sometimes ask for favourite toys a child carried everywhere if they were searching for a kid or a favourite piece of jewellery for an adult.
As such, the quickest way to make their mortal remains unfindable was to reanimate them as my skeleton minions. Necromancy spells acted on the spirit and the soul, and the reanimation process used up all the spirit left in the bones, making them basically unrecognisable by this most common type of divination. Incinerating their meats theoretically did the same, and throwing their ashes in a moving river was just being safe rather than sorry.
Oh, also, I really wanted strong skeletons again, especially now that I could carry a few of them in my storage ring. The young masters' skeletons, once reanimated, were a little disappointing, but they were definitely stronger than any Qi Gathering cultivator. Still, I was saving the best for today, as both the Dao Protectors had been body cultivators and of higher cultivation to boot, and I suspected this made their bones of especially good quality for reanimation!
Storing them in storage items also effectively extended, almost indefinitely, the need to recast Animate Dead to keep them under my control, too. The relative time factor on my storage ring was close to one thousand to one, so one thousand days of subjective time to me was equal to one day of passing inside my storage ring.
Xiao Li returned to look at me and finally nodded, amused, "You know what, that's a fair point. There is no need to have the 'We're not really demonic cultivators' conversation, especially since it would be a lie in your case. It's a shame that we didn't learn much more than we already knew when you used that creepy spell to talk to the dead."
I nodded. I had tried to disguise myself before casting Speak With The Dead on the four, but that had disappointing results. Spirits always seemed to know even if you were tricking them to avoid them recognising their killer, and the two young masters were especially uncooperative with me. I had gotten a little information, but we had learned more from a cursory examination of their storage rings, which still wasn't a lot.
The spirits of the Dao Protectors were a little more helpful, but they were basically mercenaries on a short-term contract and didn't know very much. They didn't really hold their deaths against me... plus it had been Xiao Li who had killed both of them, and spirits were stupid.
The young masters were from a rich family or clan. That was basically the information we got. The world was so large that we couldn't even reliably identify which rich family they were from because there were so many with the same surname. We had passed twenty nations since we had left the Sect, after all, and each of them had their own hidden cultivation clans. The unique logograms they used for their clan's symbol weren't ones we recognised, either.
In some ways, that was a good sign... as if they were a clan name that we recognised right away, then we might have been totally screwed.
Sitting down to eat breakfast, I brightened. "You've really gotten better at cooking!" I complimented him, which caused him to flush and chuckle. It was amazing that he was bad at it, given how good of an alchemist he was... although, maybe the fact that I considered the two disciplines interchangeable was the reason I was so terrible at alchemy.
After eating, I drug the two dead Dao Protectors to the "burn pit" and used my wand to neatly debone them before asking Xiao Li to incinerate the remains. He could burn most things hot enough that only ash remained, and I knew that wasn't the normal way cremation worked. Generally, you ended up with lots of bits of bones that they then crushed into powder in order to get your "ashes", but the temperatures he was using must have been immense... not that these guys had any bones anyway, but this wasn't the first time Xiao Li burned a body for me.
I spent the next half hour both animating the new skeletons and refreshing my control over the bones of the young masters. When I was done, they stood in a line, at attention, arms abreast in close intervals like they were brand new Seaman Recruits.
"Looking sharp, gentleman," I remarked while rubbing my hands together. Another four people attempting to kill me... well, probably attempting to kill me... well, looking and acting highly suspicious... anyway, if I found another four dead cultivators, I would have a full squad of Foundation Establishment skellies. With these beginning four, I would still need to test them one on one.
I had already tested reanimated cultivators, and they tended to keep a shadow of their talents in undeath. For example, it was possible to expect these two young masters to be better swords-skeletons than average since both young masters wielded swords. It'd be fun to find out.
Moreover, wouldn't it be surprising to some future hypothetical enemy of mine to suddenly be swarmed by a half-squad of skeletons if they approached me?
I waved a hand, pulling all four of the as-yet-unarmed squad into my ring. They used too much space, though. I'd have to do something about that. It wasn't a big deal, as I had long ago gotten rid of that serpent head, but it was something I'd have to see once I reached a large civilised city again.
After gathering all of the ashes of the deceased, I departed our base under my improved third-level Invisibility spell. I couldn't cloak my cloud yet, so I wouldn't take it. Besides, I didn't need to go far. This was the Winding Rivers Realm, after all. A river was never too far away.
Once I found one, I waited carefully for a fish to pass before killing it with a beam of necrotic energy. Grabbing the corpse, I tied the bag of ashes to its tail. After making a tiny hole in the bag, I used the Necromantic cantrip Reanimate to create a zombie fish.
In the tabletop game, if you were playing a Necromancer, it kind of sucked because you only got Animate Dead at level five. That also didn't make any sense. How were you expected to be an Apprentice Necromancer and practice necromancy if you couldn't practice necromancy?!
In Merildwen's world, there were necromantic spells at each level, including a cantrip, although they had varying utility. The cantrip Reanimate wasn't very useful. It could only animate a small, dead animal and only for a few hours, but it was mainly for practice, anyway, like Prestidigitation was for practicing transmutation.
Reanimate also had the benefit of not actually turning things into gross zombies, either. It didn't suffuse the body with negative energy, like Animate Dead. It was just a moving dead body; as such, the first animals Merildwen had ever reanimated were chickens, which her family later ate for dinner.
I dropped the dead fish back into the water and compelled it to start swimming away. This was way overkill, in my opinion, since I was pretty sure that just incinerating someone's body into ashes was enough, but it didn't take too long, and their ashes would be spread over miles and miles of riverbed before the spell wore off.
I thought it was worth it. It was just straddling the fence between being too complicated a scheme when compared to just throwing their ashes in the river, but I liked it. Overkill was good.
---xxxxxx---
The young woman who was slowly waking up looked a lot better than when my corpse puppet pulled her out of my ketch. We had treated her wounds, and then I had cleaned all of her clothes through judicious application of forbidden cultivation techniques and mended them with cantrips before cleaning and redressing her.
I thought she would appreciate waking up, not totally grimy, with her own clothes clean and repaired. I certainly would have. If there was an average cultivator beauty type, then she exemplified it, with glossy black hair, pale smooth skin and enough bosoms to entrance most men without being a hindrance in athletic situations.
She was still missing her arm, though. We had only made a cursory examination of the young master's belongings, and we only found one such pill to regrow a limb, but there could be others. There was just so much in their storage rings that we had at least trebled our individual wealth each; at least it would once we split and disposed of all of it that we wouldn't keep.
Xiao Li and I were sitting in front of our fake fire, waiting for both of them to wake up. Our fire was actually just a formation that created heat and light in a repeating fire-like illusion in order to prevent constant smoke from being visible, and it was pretty convincing unless you stared at it for more than a few minutes, wherein you would start to detect a repetition in its pattern.
It was a common utility spirit tool useful for camping, so common that I didn't make it. We had a different one, but the young masters had a fancier version, so we just swapped it out.
We had a bet on who would wake first, and Xiao Li guessed the girl, so I scowled when I saw her eyes start to flutter open. I pulled out a spirit stone and handed it to him as he chuckled. If you've never really been out in the middle of nowhere, you might not understand the impulse, but when I was a kid, we used to bet on which rolley-polley bug would be the fastest for lack of anything better for entertainment.
She went from waking up to suddenly being awake rapidly, sitting up in a flash and looking around, left and right. I could imagine that she was a bit confused right now as if I was in her position, I probably would have been expecting to get murdered, raped or both. I mean, if we had just not helped her, she would have been murdered. Nothing we found from the young master's rings gave us any clue as to why they were targetted, and their spirits basically told me to go fuck myself when I asked them.
When she saw us, her eyes were narrowed as if she expected to be amongst enemies, and she had already drawn a slightly curved sabre from her storage ring that we found in one of the young master's rings. Considering the dresses and underthings inside of it, it was obvious who the ring belonged to, so I put it back on her hand. It wasn't a very large ring, to begin with, so I didn't have any problem returning her property even though most in this world would consider we won it fair and square and that they should be happy, we even saved their lives.
I hummed as I could tell that she was wielding her sabre with her non-dominant hand. Xiao Li made a 'tsk' of disapproval and probably had a lot more insights into why she should practice more than I did.
However, her eyes widened a little bit when she saw that we were not what she was expecting, and both of us waved in a friendly way. I tried to make my wave extra jaunty.
Then she looked down and saw the guy I ambushed with. Sleep starting to stir, she immediately shoved her sabre back into her ring and stood up to run the couple of metres that we had, separating the two, dropping to her knees and cradling the still-groggy man's hand, "Senior Brother Hao!"
Oh, this was something straight out of a telenovela. I didn't have popcorn, but I popped a piece of candy that I had bought in the big city, having saved some of it over the past three months. They were kind of like those candy peanuts, except fluffier, and I was almost out. Xiao Li saw it and nudged me with an elbow, so I sighed and handed him the last piece.
"Junior Sister Ming Yu!" the man surnamed Hao exclaimed, sitting up in shock, "You're alive! Your arm!" The reunification was sugary and sweet, and there were over two minutes of them just fussing over each other.
«Now I don't know how to interrupt, but they just keep going,» Xiao Li sent me a message with his spiritual sense, looking decidedly embarrassed. I knew what he meant. It was like we were peeping, almost, despite this being our campground here. Even the name of this jade beauty was stereotypically super-feminine, as I thought it likely that the characters for "Bright Feather" were likely used when she wrote it.
However, the word Ming has a lot of homonyms. She could be the demonic cultivator Nether Feather! Soft, yet dangerous. 'Oh, that sounds good. Why couldn't I have picked that as my name instead of Mei Wen?' I thought wistfully and decided to remember it if I ever went undercover, as Senior Sister Han implied might happen. Or perhaps I could select it as my Daoist title later when I got closer to the Core Formation stage?
Daoist Netherfeather? Daoist Mingyu? It had a certain ring to it, a bit of gravitas. I liked it, and it certainly wouldn't be the same as stealing this woman's name from whole cloth. No, of course not. Ha ha ha.
Although thinking about it, I realised the word feather didn't quite fit the cat theme I had going on right now. Daoist Mingroudian was a mouthful, not to mention that "Daoist Nethertoebeans" did not have nearly as much gravitas. I wouldn't be taken seriously, even if my paw pads when I transformed were at least as soft as most feathers. I had multiple people asking to touch them. Aw, well, I would have to think about it.
Eventually, even with me sitting there daydreaming, it became apparent to them that they were not alone. Honestly, they had to have known that already, but they were the despicable type of couple that would perform egregious acts of PDA right in front of two single dogs like Xiao Li and myself as if rubbing it in.
Now that they were done basically canoodling, they looked around with all of their senses and realised that they were inside a formation and relaxed.
Finally, they turned to approach us, and the one named Hao offered us both a bow and fist-in-palm salute, "Fellow Daoists... no, saviours... I can't thank you enough for not only saving my life but, more importantly, rescuing Ming Yu." He paused and asked, "Even if I'm not sure how you two rescued her from those bastards. Are they still looking for us?"
Xiao Li had a mouthful of that chewy candy but realised I was remaining quiet and finally got out a terse, "Dead."
"Huh?" Mr Hao asked, confused.
Xiao Li squinted and chewed rapidly before swallowing, "They're dead. We killed them. They were going to attack us, too."
"Probably," I qualified aloud, making a waffling hand gesture. Probably was good enough for me when dealing with the cultivation world. This wasn't like the Western novels I had grown up reading; I wouldn't let the bad guys draw first just because I was wearing a white hat. I mean, my hat was pretty white.
Xiao Li scowled at me before he explained what happened, recapping and giving some background to the two confused cultivators. At the end of the story, the two are seated with us by our fake fire and look a lot more lively.
The man, who looked to be a few years older than Xiao Li, was named Hao Chen. He was enthused by the recounting of the battle, saying, "That was an excellent fight! I am ashamed I wasn't able to see it or help you two. To take on two enemies of your same realm or higher apiece is remarkable! They weren't weak!"
I didn't think anyone taking this test was particularly weak, which was why I preferred attacking from ambush. Xiao Li must have been reading my mind as he said, "Ah, well, Wen is an ambush predator, so it wasn't like they had a fair fight."
I raised an eyebrow. Was this pretending to be a cat thing getting to my head? No, not really. I never really liked fair fights.
The one who was, as it turned out, named Bright Feather glanced sideways at what was obviously her Dao companion before saying, "Senior Brother Hao... maybe..." Then she stopped, and both of them exchanged a flurry of spiritual sense messages back and forth.
Finally, Hao Chen nodded and said, "We only have one thing we repay your grace with, and the truth is, looking around here, I was hoping to ask for your help with it."
Xiao Li and I exchanged glances, but we didn't need to send messages to communicate. I generally let him deal with discussions and negotiations with other cultivators that impacted both of us, so he asked Hao Chen, "You don't owe us anything, 'cept your discretion. We don't know who might come after us for putting those two bozos in the ground. But, if you have some other proposition... we'll listen."
Hao Chen nodded, "The reason they were trying to murder us was that we found a naturally occurring vein of both primal fire and primal ice. We were both fortunate enough to absorb some, but the vein is large enough for dozens of other cultivators to use. They came across us as we were trying to conceal it, for now, and discovered the secret." He ruefully shook his head, "If we had these same formations, we wouldn't have been chased down like dogs in the street. Honestly, this entire test has been being chased by one thing or another, even after we finished the test. But being chased by some diremonster was the reason we found the primal vein, so I don't know if we were blessed or cursed."
I raised my eyebrows, and Xiao Li and I shared another glance. Primal fire and primal ice were a type of naturally occurring energy, not really a physical material. There were a lot of different kinds, and they were all degraded forms of the Solar True Fire or Lunar True Water that was allegedly used to create the realm when it was brought into being.
A cultivator, if they were careful and had a good enough cultivation technique and foundation, could capture a whisp of one of these types of energies and bring it into their violet palace, their Qi-sea. If carefully nurtured, it could have a qualitative effect on the Qi that you could bring to bear. You wouldn't have more Qi, but you'd have Qi of a slightly better quality and density.
Of course, like many things in cultivation, absorbing this type of energy could cause you to explode if you weren't careful. Because, of course it could. Practically everything in this world would cause you to explode, it seemed like.
These things were a natural treasure of the world that couldn't be moved, so they were something you always hoped to find but never really expected to.
The primal fire was doubly useless to me. Not only would I probably incinerate if I tried to absorb it, but the main qualitative advantage to acquiring it, beyond the slight increase in Qi quality, was for alchemists and smiths. Fire was the most important part of alchemy... I knew that even if I didn't really understand why.
The primal ice, on the other hand, since it had a connection to Lunar True Water, was actually just what the doctor ordered. I wouldn't be able to benefit from crafting like Xiao Li, but I thought the straight benefit to my Qi would be much higher than if someone who didn't practice my cultivation method absorbed some.
We'd be fools not to accept the offer, in other words. But that meant that we'd have to be careful about it, too. Absorbing this type of energy took quite a while, and if your elbow was bumped, let's say, by being betrayed and attacked while you were doing it, well, you would explode.
Xiao Li didn't waste time, "This formation was made by Wen. We can move it over to the vein of primal ice and fire, and you can keep it. Wen, how long will this formation last?"
If I had been using formation flags, it would have lasted only a few weeks. However, I had carefully painted all of the formations on several plates, which made them semi-permanent. A true permanent formation would involve stationary large metal and stone emplacements and casting molten metal instead of ink. I had yet to make a true permanent formation. Still, this one would last a fair amount of time, so I replied, "At least five years before it needs maintenance. Ten if the usage is small. It should be effective on virtually everyone in the Foundation Establishment realm, and perhaps incidental discovery by not very perceptive Core Formation cultivators."
I had been planning to take it with me—a secret base in the wilderness seemed like it might be a recurring theme for us. But it was a small price to pay for this opportunity that didn't happen every day.
They both looked pleased. Hao Chen said, "That's definitely long enough for us to return to our family and arrange for it to be exploited. Only when we announce it will Core Formation cultivators be clued off, and by then we'll have enough backing from our clans and sect to be able to protect it."
I hummed noncommittally, nodding. The two boys started gathering up all of our belongings while Bright Feather motioned conspiratorially to me to join her away from both of them.
"Sister Mei Wen..." she began, "...the primal vein is also in an unusual stabilised yin-yang configuration."
I raised my eyebrow but nodded, not seeing the point.
She coughed delicately, "In this configuration, it makes it ideal for two cultivators to absorb it together..."
"I don't see how that would work—" I began, perplexed.
"—through dual cultivation..." she interrupted me, face red as a beet.
Oh. Ohhh. She thought Xiao Li and I were a couple like they obviously were. I snorted, trying to stifle a snicker, and shook my head. Not only was that ridiculousbut Xiao Li was way too young for me, anyway.
Although, I couldn't fault Miss Bright Feather for not noticing that as Xiao Li didn't look his age at all—he had shot up like a weed since I had met him. He was close to two metres tall now, which was quite an increase since I had originally been taller than him when we first met. That was pretty typical of body cultivators, though, if they started cultivating when they were young.
Dual cultivation wouldn't have been an option even if we were a couple, as that would make us both helpless while we were in flagrante delicto. We didn't know these two people well enough to put our lives entirely in their hands, and that's exactly what a hypothetical couple would have to do in order to dual-cultivate this type of natural treasure while they were nearby. Even with a ton of formations and traps it wouldn't be safe enough to even think about it. I could see from her face, though, that was exactly how they had done it. How romantic.
"Ah, Bright Feather, you misunderstand... Xiao Li and I do not have that sort of relationship. We are like siblings," I tried to explain to her, which only caused her to become even more embarrassed.
However, once she got ahold of herself, her last word to me after looking between Xiao Li and myself was, "Really?"
---xxxxxx---
The vein of spiritual energy was contained in a cave, as these types of things often were. The two glowing energies lazily turned around each other in a gentle spiral, which gave me the impression that they would have to manage carefully who was allowed to absorb these energies as if either the blue glowing primal ice or the blistering fire got out of balance by being depleted too quickly then something unusual and unpredictable might happen.
That probably decreased the value of the find a little, as most cultivators were more compatible with primal fires. However, that was like finding out that your huge gold mine was only half as big as you originally thought it was.
Xiao Li offered, "I'll guard you first."
I nodded, but still, I put a few formations and Glyphs of Warding down in the mouth of the cave, just in case. I felt pretty good about these two lovebirds, but one should never unquestioningly trust in Magicland China.
Hao Chen and Ming Yu totally understood our perspective and were making it easy by staying very far away, inside the centre of the illusory formation outside the cave. I had decided to give Ming Yu the one limb regrowing pill in the young master's storage ring, both out of gratititude but also so that she would have something to focus on. It took one or two days of meditating and absorbing the medicinal energy in a pill like that for your whole arm to be regrown.
"Okay, I'm not sure how long this will take," I warned him, and he just shrugged and sat down criss-cross applesauce in the front of the cave, totally unbothered.
Although the energies were circling one another, there was one side of the cave that was ice cold and one that was almost boiling. I sat down in a similar lotus style inside the coldest section of the cold side of the cave, closed my eyes and reached out with my senses and my Qi to ever so gently coax a thin whisp of the blue energy towards myself.
It was both a flirt and playing hard to get, but even after a couple of hours, I didn't allow myself to feel bored or frustrated. Ever since my durance in the Woods that Wend, I had an incredible advantage in terms of patience. This would take as long as it would take.
Finally, the thin wisp of energy that had been floating around me was coaxed into my body and into my Zifu, whisping around the depression I had made for my Qi sea. I had already begun the process of creating the pillars necessary to hold my future Golden Core. That was the entire purpose of the Foundation Establishment realm, but they weren't much to look at so far.
There were many different styles of pillars that one could make, although most cultivators didn't like to experiment and went with something similar to what I would call a Greek or Roman style.However, the taller the pillar, the better, as long as you could keep it stable, so I picked a somewhat radical design.
I would know if it worked when I reached the peak of this realm, and if it didn't, then I would have to tear everything down and start again. It would be a huge waste of time, but that was something I had more of than most cultivators, anyway.
Eventually, though, it was going to look like a radio and observation tower from my last life, very similar to the Space Needle. Going with a frame-style construction instead of a solid pillar was going to allow me to reach much higher with the same amount of Qi available while still remaining as strong, or probably even stronger, than a huge solid pillar that could tip over in a strong wind.
My goal now was to fully draw in this entire wisp of utterly cold energy into myself without freezing solid and then incorporate it into my violet palace, my inner world here.
Drawing the power in was simple now that it was already a little bit inside me. I just treated it like a spaghetti noodle and slowly slurped it up—very slowly.
I was in a precarious position now because I think I was already partially frozen—the primal ice both protecting and menacing me. If I suddenly moved and the ice departed, I wouldn't be surprised if parts of me broke off, but everything would be fine once I finished absorbing and incorporating it.
My first idea was to incorporate the energy directly into my Qi sea, using the liquid Qi to act as, in effect, a heat exchanger and diffusing the "cold energy" throughout a large body of liquid. It didn't particularly matter that there was no real heat inside my Violet Palace to begin with because this was all conceptual.
This didn't work... or rather, it sort of did. However, tests I did say that the Qi I used would then have a brittleness to it. I wouldn't be able to use this ice-brittle Qi to make any kind of pedestal for my Golden Core. It would crack and break.
Perhaps if what I was cultivating was a true "ice" cultivating method, then this might have worked or even been ideal, but as it was, it would just sever my cultivating journey and allow me to go no further if I persisted.
I tried combining it with my naturally ghostly yin Qi core, too. Both things were "cold", so I thought it might work, but they just refused to commingle, totally refusing to blend.
I wanted to sigh, but I didn't want to change my normal meditative breathing patterns. It did not matter; I had tons of ideas—one of them would work.
---xxxxxx---
One did—after about a dozen failures, anyway. What ended up working the best in the end was snow. But not just snow sitting on the banks of my Qi sea. I had tried that right after trying to combine it with my ghostly Qi.
I had tried ice. Ice just by itself. Ice sculptures. Ice covering what would become my pedestal. That last one might have worked if I had absorbed this primal ice much later and had a much larger pedestal to work with, but as it was, I had way too much ice energy left to coat it with.
What worked for me was snowfalling. Not a huge amount, not a blizzard, but a light but steady snowfall that promised to cover your car completely by the morning. However, my inner world was my inner world, and it never accumulated. It fell, hit the ground and disappeared to return to fall once more in a never-ending cycle of gentle snowfall.
It was quite pretty, I thought—just the weather where you'd want to curl up with a good book and a hot chocolate instead of doing anything outside. It was a comfortable and cosy feeling for me.
Finally, I opened my eyes, but I did it too quickly and caused a few of my eyelashes, which had frozen solid, to snap and break off. I let out an exhale in a long sigh and waited for my body to normalise. I didn't want to lose all my hair, after all, by moving too quickly.
Eventually, as the energy suffused my body completely, I felt invigorated and counter-intuitively warm. Well, what I was feeling was comfort. However, humans tend to think of comfort in the context of freezing temperatures as warming up. If I went beyond my initial hind-brain feelings, though, I realised that I was just very comfortable in the cold now—even way more than I had already been, and I had already reached "husky dog" levels of tolerating the cold, where snow would just accumulate on me and I not be bothered by it, but that was all mundane cold and mundane snow.
Now, it was the same for supernatural types of chills, too. At least, up until a point. Things colder than this primal ice would still give me trouble.
I stood up and stretched and noticed Xiao Li waiting for me. He grinned, "That took you a while."
It certainly felt like it, but besides feeling really hungry, I had no conception of how much time had passed, so I asked, "How long?"
"About five days," he remarked, stretching himself.
Wow. That was a lot longer than I thought. Would I ever reach the stage of mythical navel-gazing where I sat down to meditate and a hundred years passed? I hoped not, but who knows?
I walked into the entrance of the cave, giving the supernaturally hot section of the inner cave an even wider berth than I had before. I asked him, "So, are you going to absorb the primal fire right away?"
"I'm going to absorb both," he declared.
"Huh?" I asked.
He chuckled and said, "I might end up like when you found me if I just absorb only primal fire, where I was totally out of balance and cooking myself and my cultivation from the inside out. I need to absorb a little bit of the primal ice, too, to balance me out. Just a little, though—it'll still be mostly fire I will be absorbing."
I shook my head. Unless one was walking pretty far down the niche Dao of Steam, that sounded insane or something a protagonist out of a story would have to do. Really, this wasn't the first protagonist-type thing that Xiao Li had done, either. I have been noticing it more and more.
As long as I wasn't the tsundere Icy (Icier now) Beauty destined for his harem, then I supposed it was alright. Oh, I didn't want to be his tragic and unrequited love interest who was killed in the third arc, either and fuelled his revenge-based advancement.
"As long as you're sure and you're careful," I urged him and took his place guarding the entrance. I made myself comfortable, checked the formations and glyphs I had placed and pulled out a few books to read. I had already read about the strange auxiliary cultivation technique I received from Han Meiying, but I had the feeling I needed to read it a lot more than once to truly start to understand it.
It was basically a Soul cultivation technique, which was why it was considered auxiliary. It would grow the size, strength and durability of your soul, but this didn't directly translate into increased strength or increased cultivation.
Although one could theoretically reach a similar stage to Core Formation, Nascent Soul, or maybe even further just through your soul, I hadn't heard of anyone ever doing that. Even Masters or Mistresses in the Soul Dao that I have been told of were primary Qi cultivators. After all, even if you had a huge and powerful soul and dangerous soul techniques, you still needed Qi to use them.
It took me the first day to reread the entire volume, and it wasn't that long. It was like one of those non-fiction books that you could tell was written by someone much smarter than you and that you had reread each paragraph three or four times. Just the profundity of some parts of it gave me a spirit ache, which was kind of like a headache, except no medicine helped it.
Normally, I was a pretty good book learner but with this? I would need to practice this.
I pulled my athame out of my storage space and inspected it. That damn serpent had eaten half of the wrathful spirits I had brought with me. I didn't even know how that was possible, but it was clear that the serpent had some affinity with the Dao of devouring or something along those lines. It made me really glad I never tried to jump in its mouth and kill it, Jonah and the Whale style. Monsters that had some affinity with the concept of devouring generally had ways to keep or incapacitate what they devoured.
Wait, Jonah didn't kill the whale, did he?
Well, it didn't really matter.
I let a couple of the spirits out and hummed. The cultivation technique was specifically for entire souls, so attempting this with just remnant spirits wasn't going to do much or anything for me. It would, however, allow me to practice, which I felt was invaluable.
Wrathful spirits were, well, wrathful. These were especially worthwhile to me because I was the one who created each of them. However, I allowed one to slip into my inner world carefully, using the technique to suck it in. I was ready to smoosh it to death with the total weight of my soul at the first sign of something going wrong, but it went rather smoothly. Instead of it wrathfully floating around me, it wrathfully floated around my Qi sea.
However, it wasn't comfortable. The technique told me to expect this, so I wasn't surprised.
It didn't really hurt, but it kind of reminded me of a cut on the top of your mouth or inner lip—it would heal if only you could stop tonguing it. Like the primal ice, I was hyperaware of it inside my inner world but unlike the ice, there was no way in hell that I would incorporate wrathful spirits, or souls of other people, into me. As such, they would always feel foreign, unlike my snow, which now felt natural and was a part of me.
By the time Xiao Li stood up two days later, I had all the remaining wrathful spirits inside my inner world and had mostly gotten used to the discomfort. The technique said that eventually, it wouldn't cause me any discomfort anymore, and if anything, I would come to enjoy the feeling, but I thought that was kind of optimistic.
Every now and then, I would mentally prod them and get them to do things. Like fly in various formations, and the like since that was basically all they could do. I didn't have the mental capability to make this sort of parallel processing automatic, but that was another thing that the technique said would come in time.
At the very least, this was a better way to store these spirits than using my athame. I wouldn't need to pull that thing out of storage if I wanted to sic them on someone. I could probably open my mouth and do a banshee scream full of wrathful spirits at someone. Wouldn't that be a surprise?
"How did you do it so fast when you absorbed both energies?" I asked him as he approached, somewhat disgruntled.
He grinned affably, "I suppose I am just that good." He held out a hand, and a rather dangerous-looking flame popped into existence over it.
I peered at it, "Is that it? Why isn't it burning my eyebrows off?" It did look like the twirling fire energy, but I wasn't feeling the thermal bloom I was expecting.
"That's the main reason this helps so much for alchemy. If you bind a type of supernatural fire into your body and soul, then it will only burn what you want it to burn," he said smugly.
"Hmmm... I wonder if I can freeze things in a discriminating way," I wondered aloud, but I didn't feel any obvious way to do so. I couldn't even summon the ice at all like he could summon the fire. It was too busy being my snow. Maybe the way he incorporated it was special. Perhaps he had an alchemy cauldron in his soul's inner world or something.
Either way, I bet my ice spells would have a boost, though, so I was looking forward to the next time I cast Ice Storm.
"There is less than a week left before we have to turn our heads," Xiao Li remarked and suggested, "What's say we stay here a couple of days and then head back with the two lovebirds?"
I snickered and nodded, "Sure."
---xxxxxx---
"Those of you that remain are now official members of the Sky Guards Army," a dour-faced man whose cultivation I couldn't see through said. Maybe sixty per cent of those who took the test had returned, and about half of those weren't able to complete the test, so this Sky Guards Army business had both a relatively lethal and difficult test to get into.
Servants appeared and handed each of us fancy cloaks as well as badges. The badges had the logo of the Sky Guards Army, which was a stylised cloud with a shiny sword emerging from the cloud. On the sword's blade was a single star.
"You are all now considered One-Star Devas," he announced, which explained the emblem. "That is your ranking in our organisation. It means that you can take only One-Star or Two-Star jobs."
Now that I knew what I was looking for, I noticed he had a belt that had four stars on the buckle. He continued, "The highest rank is Seven-Star Deva, although I have never personally met anyone of this level. Promotions to Two and Third stars are automatic upon completion of three jobs at that level, while promotions past that are at the discretion of the Army and not solely based on your personal strength, although I have never heard of anyone strong enough being denied promotion if they sought it."
I hummed quietly, not sure how far I would get in this mercenary organisation. There was some motive to keep your rank artificially low, as you were obligated to do at least one mission of your rank or above every ten years; otherwise, your membership would be deactivated, and you would lose the benefits of membership, which included the use of the Sky Guards teleporters, merchants and access to their Dao and divine skill repositories.
If I just wanted to skate by and use their extensive teleporter network, then perhaps a One-Star Deva, I would remain. I wouldn't have access to the best skills, techniques or the like at a low rank but I had a feeling that it might be incredibly grindy to get the points for some of the best in there anyway, and it might be quicker to search elsewhere.
After the induction, we both bid the two lovebirds goodbye and then used the teleporter to reach about halfway back to the Silver Serenities Sect.
The twisty feeling of teleportation was familiar, and for a moment, it looked like we didn't move at all, but then I realised that the Sky Guards teleportation chambers were basically identical. I only noticed that the man running it had a beard, whereas the last guy didn't, and that clued me in.
He made a cursory check that our emblems were correct and that we weren't imposters before wishing us well and allowing us to leave.
Xiao Li jumped onto my cloud as we sped away and asked, "Shall we go directly back to the Sect?" Xiao Li sure was eager to pick up Senior Sister Xi Mengyao.
But I shook my head, "No. Let's spend a few days in the nearby city. It's pretty large, and there are a number of supplies I want to replenish and things I'd like to do."
"'Things'?" he asked sceptically.
I nodded. I wasn't even being lewd this time. According to my notes, although this city was fairly large by mortal standards, the highest cultivators were in the Core Formation stage. It was about equivalent to the capital city that the young emperor reigned over, but in this case, there wasn't a branch of the Hidden Flowers Fairylands or a similar cultivator-run brothel. Mortal girls just didn't do it for me anymore.
That said, I did want to get a pretty luxurious villa and spend some time in the bathtub, too. Relaxation after three months in the wilderness was appropriate, even if it was chaste.
I also had a few items I wanted to try to secure, including a specialised storage item. The notes suggested that I could get some customised artificery there.
He shrugged, "Okay, that sounds fine, I suppose. I guess a roof over my head would be a nice change of pace."
"Indeed," I said in anticipation of exactly that.
It didn't take long to fly there, and after we were welcomed in by a Qi Gathering guard, we split up so that Xiao Li could go arrange for a rental villa while I was searching out the artificers in the cultivator part of the city.
"Welcome, Senior," the clerk told me as I entered the small shop. This was the third place I tried, but the others claimed that they couldn't really create customised storage items, and I got the impression that they were mainly artifice retailers rather than having an arrangement with a craftsman. He continued, "How can we help you today?"
The clerk was in the middle of the Qi Gathering stage and might be an apprentice, but I just didn't know. I said, "Thank you. I'm interested to see if you are able to commission the construction of a customised spatial storage artefact."
He raised his eyebrows but nodded, "Indeed. That is a request we sometimes receive and can accommodate. What kind of customisation were you interested in?"
I smiled, pleased, "I was told that if one could restrict the type of items that a storage artefact could store, then it would be possible to increase the storage volume. Is that true?"
"Ah! Yes, yes it is," the clerk confirmed happily, "It's not a common request, but we have fulfilled this before. For example, a cultivator that used massive amounts of sand in battle bought an item from us to store sand. Generally speaking, the more restrictions on the types of items it can store the bigger the space. For example, this man was able to get a fairly large item that only stored sand, and then he was able to treble that storage by specifying that it could only store a certain kind of river sand."
That was perfect. I rubbed my hands together, "In that case, I would like to see about commissioning one of these custom storage devices. Maybe in the form factor of a bracelet or anklet."
The clerk pulled out a grease pencil and a slate and nodded, "And what type of items should this bracelet or anklet be able to store?"
I was so excited about the possibility that I didn't think through what I was saying. I just blurted out, "The bones of human cultivators."
I paused, and then realised I could be more specific; I corrected with a beautiful smile, "No, wait. The bones of human cultivators who have reached at least the first level of the Foundation Establishment realm."
"Lady... what the fuck?" the clerk asked, aghast.
---xxxxxx---
"I think they've finally stopped chasing us, Wen. Dear god, they just wouldn't stop," Xiao Li said. Instead of my cloud, we were making our escape on his sword, which he had widened for my comfort, although I still had to use Qi in my feet to stay aboard.
"At least we didn't have to kill anyone..." I said quietly.
He chuckled, "Are you forgetting that guy that almost caught up with us? You paralysed him on his flying sword. He must have fallen twenty li."
"He was a body cultivator! Body cultivators in the Foundation Establishment realm can survive falling from terminal velocity easily!" I replied heatedly.
He shook his head, looking amazed, "Why did they try to arrest you? We will never get the security deposit back on that villa. And all of those fires..." He shook his head.
I dropped my head, embarrassed and turned away so he couldn't see my face and lied my ass off, "I don't know."
"They probably realised you weren't human. Racist bastards!" Xiao Li yelled.