The air was hot and humid, a first for the Great Desert Strip.

Moisture normally can’t be found an hour after the rains, but it was today. Even within the valley, the outer edges would be slightly dry. The water being protected by the inner forests and lakes would flow into rivers and make its way to the village.

And while the sands were mostly dry, they were also wet. Not on the surface, but deep beneath it, the water had traveled down into the thirsty earth and… soaked.

It had yet to disappear or be destroyed. It had merely soaked.

The desert crabs for the first in thousands of years, all drank. Normally they would need to die to reproduce, sacrificing their innate qi to create water that would nourish their young. But today there was no death. There was no thirst beneath to steal away the rain, and the beasts that knew only struggle and death now tasted something new. That would lead to a population burst eventually, pushing them to breed in the pockets of water without having to sacrifice themselves and multiplying their numbers in a mere season, and while that wouldn’t mean much when one remembered the vastness of the Great Desert Strip, from now on the desert crabs could do one thing they could never do before.

They could grow.

They tended to die at the second rank. There simply wasn’t enough qi for them to both reproduce and stay alive.

I watched as they scuttled about beneath the ground and Chin, unable to see all this, frowned.

“Keep focus,” I told him.

He replied with an irritated grunt, keeping hold of his meditative stance.

There would be lots of monster hunters making their way here soon. The flaw with this desert wasn’t just its dryness, but rather the lack of qi. That corpse beneath the earth had been eating it all, making it not only dry but also barren.

You couldn’t cultivate here and its vastness had made it impossible to settle for any mortals. Even Chin’s ancestors had been nomads, moving from oasis to oasis, and during the hotter seasons, migrating over to either side of the strip.

But now, that would change.

Qi was flooding into the area.

It was as if a large island in the middle of the ocean had suddenly disappeared.

It would be a minor ripple on the face of the continent, but it would draw in qi from the surrounding areas, if only for a moment.

Qi flowed naturally, moving with the imbalances, ebbing, and flowing like an eternal tide, even out in the void. Life both produced and consumed qi, but more often it produced it. Those pillars of life who had reached the peak of their potential and outranked everything around them pushed out qi like a waterfall.

And a new pond had just appeared to drink on their rivers.

The effects were noticeable immediately. Any cultivator would notice the immediate tug and run with it, hoping to mix the force of the qi into their own meridians, like using a water wheel to grind flour.

That was why Chin was here cultivating, instead of farming.

Of the three fundamental forces of qi, push, pull, and hold. Pulling was the one cultivators tended to waste most of their time on. Controlling qi once it was inside of you was an easy endeavor but pulling it to you from the outside was the tedious part.

But I had set up Chin in a little qi gathering array, something simple really.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

And that with the mass inwards pull to our little valley would make it so that he wouldn’t have to pull in any qi at all. It was like drinking water from the bottom of the well.

Of course there were some dangers to it, like the qi overwhelming his meridians and flooding into his dantians and sweeping away all of his innate qi.

But I had put up a few safeguards against that. One being within the array itself, and the second being the talisman stuck to his forehead.

Beads of sweat trickled down Chin’s face as he broke in the seventh step of the first rank.

That was good. Most children worked their way through the first rank quite easily.

“Chin,” I spoke.

Chin grumbled in reply, most of his mind focused on his qi circulation technique.

“Do you know why they call it the first rank, Chin? Or the second rank? Do you ever wonder why they don’t give these ranks definitive names?”

“No,” Chin replied, managing to engage in the conversation without any defect being introduced to his qi circulation.

“Why?” He asked.

He was getting good at this. At this rate he would break into the second rank by the end of the month.

“They do!” I replied. “But even within this realm, the world is so big and the people so varied that they can’t come together to define the same names for anything below the immortal rank. They’ll call it the qi condensation stage in some place, the grounding stage in others. They only have common names for the tenth rank beings within this realm. And in the grander multiverse, you don’t hear of a common name for ranks until people get to the fifteenth realm.”

Chin nodded in response.

“Anyway, how’s Medin doing?” I asked.

“She broke into the first rank,” he replied.

“Already? She’s even faster than you,” I mumbled.

“She likes to cultivate,” he muttered.

Rin Wi had been training Medin to cultivate. Rin Wi knew the basics about as well as anyone so Medin was in good hands. And I’d even made a custom cultivation manual and technique just for her.

When I’d ask Medin what drove her to it, she talked about keeping healthy in her old age and getting the youthful fire in her once more.

But she really seemed to want to hang out with Rin Wi. To her, cultivation wasn’t a thing you did for the sake of heavenly rebellion and power. No, to Medin cultivation was just a hobby her friend could teach her.

It was Tai Chi on a Saturday afternoon, bingo at the bowling alley. It was just something she could do to spend time with her friend.

I’d gotten a good laugh out of that.

Medin really was something. She had to be to hitch her wagon to this old rock of a man.

“Chin, there’s some trouble coming our way within a few days.”

Chin instantly cut his cultivation short.

“What? How? Who? When? Can’t you stop them?”

“Relax. It’s not going to hurt anyone…well it’s not going to hurt anything you care for.”

“But what is it?” Chin asked.

“A fight, between two fifth ranks within the great desert strip.”

“Again?” Chin muttered.

“I’m not going to be involved in it. But one of them keeps trying to sneak in and the other will be sure to follow. I could keep blocking them out but I’m thinking about letting them in.”

“Why?” Chin nearly shouted.

“It feels right.”

Chin stared at me with a viciously annoyed look.

“They won’t get into the village, or anywhere near it Chin.”

The man’s face instantly relaxed and he went right back into qi circulation.

This guy.

“Anyways, I’m thinking of making a spectacle of it. The guy wants to enter the desert to see me uphold my no violence rule, but he’s a bastard.”

“So? You let that other guy go didn’t you?”

“Sure,” I nodded. “But I let him go. This guy wants to hole up here and avoid the consequences of his actions. And if I let him do that then other bastards might come to the same conclusion. I don’t want this place to be a haven for criminals, Chin. People can just hide here after a lifetime of evil. Or worse, demonic path cultivators might use this place as their home base and go out and commit their crimes, knowing they have a fortress protected by an immortal to hide behind.”

Chin slowly nodded at my words.

“Makes sense,” He replied. “But it would be better to just punish him instead.”

“Maybe,” I shrugged.

I looked after the village and the surrounding area, sure, but I wasn’t really a righteous path cultivator either. I wasn’t a savior.

The cost of seeking the righteous path was fighting against the demonic one.

Suffering was endless, wars were endless. Within existence, pain was eternal and no matter what I did, no matter how many I saved, even if I were to reach the ninth step of God-Imperium, I would change little.

There was a difference to mortal between one and one billion lives. There was a difference between that and a quadrillion, but I had seen whole realms slaughtered for minor insults. I’d seen infinite sets of lives be burned for petty quarrels.

The evils of existence were too large, too vast. It wasn’t my place to fight them.

Leave that to the Heavens.

That had always been how I thought. But now… I itched. Bit by bit, I found myself unable to sit and tolerate some things. Even if I couldn’t keep all of it safe, I could at least take care of my own backyard, no?

“Maybe,” I repeated.