I floated above the village, sending down my senses to observe them. It was hectic down there, everyone was moving about getting things ready for something, maybe a seasonal festival. You never really knew with mortals, they lived short lives but celebrated every day like it was their last. I understood the feeling, but being as old as I am now, the idea of celebrating holidays every single year sounded tiring to me.

This village had popped up during one of my longer expeditions. I had left the realm in search of some material for a few years and when I came back, I found that a group of five hundred people had suddenly set up shop in my backyard. Civilization was a tedious side-effect of human existence. If you had a nice piece of land that had no present dangers and farmable ground, well, you’d eventually get people. So I helped them set up shop under the guise of a local ‘hidden master.’

I even went out of my way to register myself as a rogue cultivator through one of the wandering merchant clans. I wanted to hide, but I also wanted to blend in, and the lack of qi within this specific area made it extremely unattractive to other cultivators so claiming the land was actually an uncomplicated process. And besides, people were fun.

"Chin Chin!" I called out, walking up to one farmer in particular.

Chin Chin was the village chief, though he didn’t act like it. He was mostly up here pulling out weeds or plowing fields. A lot of times you’d see people working alongside him, mostly his farm hands, but there would also be villagers and laymen who wanted his advice or permission on a subject. Even I’d have to come up here if I needed him for anything.

“Chin Chin,” I said, landing to the right of the man. “When’s the festival?”

“No festival,” he replied. He hadn’t bothered to look up at me. He used an old piece of bamboo to smack the side of one of the oxen and adjusted his plow to stay on course. I walked alongside him as he continued to steer the plow.

“Then what’s all the commotion down here?”

“They changed the rain bringers. It’s going to be the Kong clan this year.”

“What’s wrong with the Kong clan?” I asked in a rare moment of confusion.

“Everything,” Chin grumbled. “They always do it too quickly. Everyone knows you need the rainy season to last through at least three months, but with the Kong we’ll be lucky if we get two. And it’s always flooding rain as well, it’s like they think the same amount of water over a shorter season won’t affect our harvest. Two months of thunder and floods means I’ll have to change out the crops as well. And then they say a Sect cultivator is heading our way on top of that, so we have to get the inn ready for him as well.”

“How are you going to switch out the crops?”

“Po Pen is going to get all the chickens in the village and have them graze over the seedbed for a few days. They should uproot most of the seeds if not all of them,”

“What about the merchants?” I asked.

“Kopin is dealing with the preparation for that, but the work for them ain’t much. They bring their own tents and supplies and we just give them some land to sleep on. Though the short rainy seasons means that there’ll be a whole lot of them trying to cross the Strip all at the same time, so we’ll have to clear up more land on the hillsides.”

I let out a low whistle.

“That’s a lot of preparation,” I replied.

Chin just gave a light nod

The rainy season was the most important one to mortals. But the problem was, a planet this size rarely had the consistent weather patterns people needed to survive. There were seasons, but they came in centuries, not months. And Ah-Marin itself didn’t rotate around a major star, instead, it held seven of its own suns in orbit.

But cultivators needed mortals, because as superior as they thought they were, a king without his people was just a man with a crown. So they stepped up and controlled the weather manually. In this specific case, the duty of rain bringer was tossed onto one of the major clans within the Void Blade Sect, which was the sect that ruled over this continent.

And when your village or country or even empire relied on a small group of people to bring you the most basic of human resources, you tended to keep an eye on that stuff. Chin barely knew the names of the small sects that ruled over this region, but he knew which clan of the Void Blade Sect would be the rain bringer for the next thirty years.

It was impressive. This village was roughly two thousand miles away from any other villages and the region itself was hundreds of thousands of miles away from the empire’s capital, and yet they still knew what was going on within the central reaches of The Void Blade Empire. I looked up at the structure responsible for this.

A few miles from the village, visible from almost anywhere in the valley was a very large hill. It was about two miles tall, a small mountain I suppose, and on that hill was a tower. The Tower was built for the mortals by the mortals and they’d made it as high as they could manage, which was only about seventy feet, but that combined with the height of the hill was more than good enough to grant them the ability to see a few thousand miles away.

Up there were three things, fuel, lenses, and books. On a super-sized planet, the horizon would stretch out much further than a regular one, and because of that light speed communication was possible. After all, you could see light , and with the proper lenses, you could even magnify it. Add in a decent telescope and a Morse code-like flashing language, and you basically had a very tedious telegram system.

“You need help?” I asked him.

Chin turned to look at me, face plain and unsurprised.

“There’s a plow over by that tree. You can take the right side of the hill, but make sure not to overplow.”

I looked over to the right side of the hill he’d pointed to.

“That must be thirty acres.”

“Thirty-two,” he corrected. “And it’ll take you thirty minutes to do it all.”

I looked at him for a moment, and then I sighed with resignation.

Chin was stubborn to the point of insanity. His father, the previous village chief, had wanted him to be the Light Master. The Light Master was the person responsible for managing everything to do with the Light Tower, and the job came with inherit status. Generally, it was a position given to the village chief, passed down from father to son.

But Chin refused, much to his father’s dismay. They would have long drawn-out arguments that would last hours at times. And though Chin stayed true to what he wanted, his father was resolute that he get the training to be a Light Master. And he did, but he always applied what he learned towards farming. He would sneak out of his house at night to see what bugs were eating his plants. During the rainy season, he would leave cups out in the rain to record how much water they were getting and for how long.

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In the end, his father gave up. The position of Light Master was passed to Chin’s brother-in-law and Chin was designated as a farmer village chief. He was surprisingly willing to take up that position and had taken to it like a fish to water. The man was capable and efficient, which was why he tried to get me to work every moment he could.

I visited the village every month or two, but Chin was the only one to have ever asked me to work. The first time he’d asked had been in front of his dad. He wanted me to carve out a path for the rainwater to travel through. Much to his father’s horror, I had obliged and we had spent that afternoon digging up for the river to be diverted to. I think to Chin, better was a quality that only things have. No person is better than another person, not intrinsically, and to him, that includes cultivators.

“Are you done?” I asked as the sweaty middle-aged man squatted down beside me.

“For the day,” he answered. “There’s not much more to do now for the land.”

“What did you plant anyway?” I asked.

“Rainy season crops mostly, vilot, berdi, and water wheat.”

“No rice?”

“Rice grows in paddies, not rain. But we’ll probably plant some after the rainy season. Lots of the low ground will be flooded for some time after the Kong’s rainy season.”

“Those sell good?” I asked.

“The merchants will eat it,” Chin shrugged.

“They don’t really have a choice,” I chuckled.

Chin shrugged again.

“They could always take the cold routes through the Strip,” he answered.

“Nah, it’s cheaper for them to camp out here for a few days instead of mapping out the cold routes.”

“Cultivators,” Chin snorted. “You can fight off wild beasts but you can’t trek across a desert.”

“Your ancestors lived in the desert Chin, and they were the ones who mapped out the cold routes before they moved here.”

“There were no merchants back then for them to sell the routes to,” Chin snorted.

“Yeah well, times are changing. And the merchants bring good money to the village, it’ll grow better that way.”

“Grow any bigger and some Sect will come by demanding taxes,” Chin said with a frown.

That was true. The village being used as a crossover point for traveling merchants was a recent development and had only been happening for a few years or so, but it was more than likely to grow as time went on.

Which meant that I should make my move sometime soon.

“Any cultivators in the Desert?”

“A few wanderers and the usual, most are just minor clansmen trying to map out the cold routes before the rainy season spreads, more merchants than cultivators.”

“Any sect cultivators?” I asked.

“They say one of the sect cultivators is aiming to cross the desert within the next week. Some Sect charting out the Desert or whatnot,” Chin replied.

“Will he come by here?” I asked.

Chin turned to with a curious look on his face.

“Why?” He asked.

“Well… I’m thinking of creating my own sect.”

“You mean your own clan?” He asked

“Nope. My own sect.”

Chin froze, letting that thought sink in for a second. Clans were small groups, maybe familial in some way, but generally, they were one total faction. Sects were different, at least within this region. They were powerful, ruling over a region, taxing it, and in some cases, being beholden to whatever empire ruled the land.

They scaled to their realms ofcourse. A sect that has a seventh rank as their leader was far different from a sect that had a fifth rank as their leader. And the same went for clans, the main difference was that sects were more of a consolidation of power. A sect would have numerous clans under their rule, and each clan would have their own people factions.

In my case, I would be declaring myself an equal to the major sects within the region.

“Are you trying to get us killed?” Chin asked in a tense but calm voice.

“No, quite the opposite really.”

Chin didn’t ask any more questions and just gave me a stare that demanded an explanation.

“How strong do you think the sect leaders are?”

“Stronger than I know,” he answered.

“They’re all at around the fifth rank, which is nothing to scoff at in this region, but still, they’re weak compared to me.”

Chin gave me another look, this time it just conveyed ridicule.

“Don’t believe me?” I asked.

“No.”

“What do you think is the most powerful thing they can do?”

“Who?” He asked.

“Those fifth-ranked cultivators. The leaders of the sects.”

Chin laid back and stared out into the dimming half-night that sprawled the sky. You rarely got full nights on Ah-Marin, the suns rotated in straight-rowed patterns, but they didn’t necessarily line up with each other. That meant that when it was nighttime in one place, it was day in another, and instead of being vertically divided, like a normal rotating planet, Ah-Marin’s night and day patterns were divided horizontally. And since there were seven suns that rotated around the planet, that meant that there were seven layers with their own individual night and day cycles.

And a lot of times, those cycles would leak into each other’s layers as well, meaning neighboring layers constantly experienced a sort of twilight, instead of a full-on night. The stars were out and shining on one side of the sky, but towards the edge of the other side, there was the beautiful dying hue of a sunset.

“I heard stories of them shattering mountains the size of this valley into pieces before. Some say they can summon oceans and create sounds so strong they would turn a dragon deaf.”

“Unrealistic,” I replied. “The best they could do is shatter a regular mountain, one twenty miles tall perhaps, and even then they’d be cleaving it half and not shattering it.”

“Maybe,” Chin replied. “But I wouldn’t want to know otherwise.”

“Pick a star,” I said.

“What?”

“Pick a star or a group of stars. Just pick one.”

Chin frowned for a second before pointing up in a general direction at the sky.

“You see them?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“Good, now run your finger over them, like you’re trying to erase writing in the dust.”

Chin kept frowning but the man did as I asked. He closed one eye, focused on the stars, and rubbed his thumb in the air.

Then he blinked. He rapidly sat up, his eyes still fixated on the sky. Then he stood up, reaching to the sky with his hands trying to swat away an invisible barrier. After that he ran to one end of the field, and then to another, and then to another, each time pausing to look up at the sky and study what he was looking at.

His facial expression changed as he went, first being skeptical and then gradually shifting into disbelief. After a few minutes of running around, he came back, sweaty and heaving, and he fell on his bum next to me, spraying me with his sweat as he fell down.

“Watch it,” I replied as I wiped my face.

“The stars are really gone,” he said, still staring up at the sky in bewilderment. “How?”

I looked up at the small and empty patch of darkness in the night sky.

“Do you remember when you first asked me to help you dig that route for that river?” I asked.

Chin nodded, his eyes still aimed upward.

“Did you think we’d actually be able to do it?” I asked.

“No. I thought it would show my father that I had a good understanding of farming.”

“But we did it, didn't we? And everyone was better off for it.”

Chin paused for a moment, some thoughts running through his mind.

“Overall, yes.”

“Well, this is sort of the same thing. I just need you to understand that everything will be fine.”

Chin looked at me, his eyes reassessing me in some way. I thought for a second that he would change and start bowing and worshiping me like I was a god or something. Then his eyes calmed down and he frowned.

“You could have tilled more than thirty acres, couldn’t you?”