Chapter 54

“What are your plans for when you grow up, Tan?” Renton asked on the fourth day of his visit. They were working in the field together, hoeing and weeding and checking the crops for bugs. Renton was completely hopeless and Tan had to check to make sure that he was doing it properly, which was annoying.

“I don’t know, but whatever I do I’ll be better at it than you are at farming,” he teased his uncle.

Renton laughed. But although there was a smile on his face, he wasn’t about to let the topic drop. “Do you want to be a farmer, Tan? You don’t have an earth or a water spirit, and those are the best for growing crops.”

“People grow crops without being cultivators,” Tan pointed out. “I don’t need to use magic to infuse the fields and the crops like my parents do. Anyway, I think I kind of figured something out when you had me help with the cherry trees. I’m still working on it, but I think that it’s important.”

“What’s that?” Renton asked.

“Plants breathe too. Same as us, except they breath in dead air and give it life, and we breath in live air and live off of it, turning it into dead air,” Tan explained. He frowned. “I’m still figure it out.”

“Don’t focus entirely on the ‘air’ part of what you’re thinking, Tan. What else do plants do?” Renton pressed, sensing that the boy was on the edge of something.

Tan frowned. “They grow. Without eating anything. And they soak in the sunshine, so I guess they feed on fire Qi too. And they need soil and water …” he frowned, then shook his head. “I’ll figure it out. Eventually. When I do I think I can use wind Qi to help plants grow.”

“I’m hopeful for you, Tan. You’re smart enough that you just might,” Renton said, grinning. “However, I’m serious about my question. What are your dreams for being an adult? What do you see yourself doing when your parents are no longer in charge of your life?”

Tan frowned, covering up a root that his uncle had exposed with his own hoe and thinking as he killed a weed his uncle had missed.

“I don’t know. I’m not really sure what else there is aside from farming,” he admitted.

“You’re a strong cultivator, Tan. You could just do that.”

“Yeah, right,” Tan laughed. “And what will I do about food if all I do is sit around growing stronger every day?”

“You can have people bring it to you,” Renton informed him. “If you joined a sect and became one of their elders, you’d never want for anything. You could spend all of your time cultivating and leave the small details of daily life to the juniors in the sect, who would give much for your insights into the dao and the process of cultivation.”

Tan frowned. “People really live like that?”

“They do,” Renton said. “So that’s one option to think about. Here’s another. When you turn sixteen, you can come work for me.”

“What do you do, anyway?” Tan asked.

“I tell other people what to do,” Renton explained. “I’m the bossiest boss that ever bossed around. But that’s not what you’d do if you came to work with me. I need people I can trust to investigate things, to solve problems. To kill demon beasts and solve issues between people who aren’t getting along like they should. There’s a lot of things you could do, and we’d train you to do them all.”

Tan frowned. “Okay. What if I hate it?”

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“Then you can always quit and go back to farming,” Renton said, a grin on his face. He paused, and Tan sensed him gathering fire Qi. He smelled the sun, and felt it as Renton infused the plants, ground, and even the water in the soil with his Qi.

One of the plants nearby caught on fire, and Tan quickly stamped it out.

“Oops,” Renton said.

Tan glared at him. “Why don’t you leave that to the people who know what they’re doing?”

“Just trying to be helpful,” Renton said sheepishly.

Tan continued to glare at him. Then he pulled on his own Qi, infusing the plants and soil and water. Not with living air, but with the dead air that plants seemed to crave.

They kept working, talking occasionally, but mostly they worked. In the afternoon, they flew out to the lake and fished, with Tan telling the story about how he had caught Elder Pike the spirit carp. Renton perked up at that.

“There’s a spirit animal in the pond?” he asked at the conclusion of the story.

“Yeah. Except in the winter. In the winter the spirit animals of the farm turn into humans and live in the old house,” Tan informed him.

“Spirit animals? Plural?” Renton asked. “How many live here?”

“Four of them. A rabbit, fox, a monkey and the carp,” he explained.

“Do you think you could introduce me? I’ve never met a spirit animal that hadn’t been hunted and cooked for me,” Renton said.

Tan glanced at him. “You eat them?”

Renton looked a bit sheepish. “Not … I don’t exactly go out of my way to order people to hunt them. Not unless they’re attacking people. But when they do, what are we going to do with the flesh except for eat it?”

Tan gave his uncle a funny look. “You’re hiding something.”

Renton sighed. “It’s … complicated. People try to please me, and in doing so they often make mistakes. Some spirit animals attack humans and they have to be dealt with. But sometimes spirit animals that are peaceful are attacked, and although I try to discourage that, I can’t exactly disprove it when they say that a spirit wolf has been killing the sheep of a shepherd, and various other examples of spirit animals being … well, animals I suppose. So when someone presents me with the body of a spirit animal that they claim to have hunted for cause, I can’t exactly string them up without proof that they were doing it just for profit.”

“So you eat them,” Tan said.

“Respectfully. Yes. I pay homage to their lingering spirits and consume their flesh, as is natural in the cycle of life and death,” Renton said. “In a way, it’s an honor for them to be consumed by me, although I’d rather that it didn’t come to that.”

“I’m not certain that they’d see it as an honor, Uncle Renton,” Tan said, scrunching his nose. “If you don’t like people feeding you spirit animals, why don’t you yell at them and send them away when they try to cook it for you? If people thought that it made you angry instead of happy, there wouldn’t be any profit in it and so they’d stop doing it except when the spirit animals actually caused problems.”

Renton opened his mouth to say something and paused. “Huh,” he said. “I guess when I realized that I was being served spirit animals, I looked back on how many I’d eaten without being aware of it. I didn’t want the people who were just following traditions to realize how upsetting it was … but you’re right. I’ll try to change the policy, but it might take some time.”

Tan shrugged. “I’d feel pretty bad if someone killed Clover or Elder Pike just to eat them.”

“Yeah, I can understand that. Do you think that they’d meet me?”

“Not if they can smell that you’ve been eating others like them,” Tan said bluntly.

Renton hung his head. “They probably can, can’t they?” He sighed and cast his line again. “Oh well.”

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