Chapter 9

Tren stuck his head into his children’s rooms one by one. First the children that were only guests. Students. Disciples. It wasn’t that he didn’t love them. He would kill for them, if he needed to. But they were not his blood. There was a limit to what he would do for them, and he was conscious of exactly where that limit lie.

Hopefully it would never be an issue. But in a contest between blood and simple mentorship, blood would always win. He would never allow himself to forget that.

Not a second time.

He smiled. The first time didn’t really count, since they were married now, and the situation had resolved itself when he had volunteered to go into exile from the world.

He smiled wider. Some exile, he thought. He was happier as a simple farmer than he’d ever been in his life. A farmer. A husband. A father twice over. A teacher.

And in a strange way, a student. Explaining the dao to children had unlocked further steps down the path that he had thought he’d reached the end of.

He flexed deep down into the sleepy earth and felt the distant limits of his power, and he relaxed. That, in this sleepy little land, should be enough. He wasn’t the strongest in the world, but he was close. There was nothing this far out in the western wastelands that any of the others in the top ten would chase after.

Nothing except perhaps for Gaia herself, he reflected.

But if they were going to take Gaia from him, they would have to be prepared to keep her, and he doubted that anyone would dare. If they did, Gaia herself would raise an inheritance of pain upon their household for their transgression.

She was both gentle and vengeful, when the mood struck her.

He checked on the oldest first. Little Pao, who wasn’t little any more. He’d been surprised when Pao had bound his spirit so quickly. Not that he’d managed it, he’d sensed a bit of spirituality from the boy in the brief interactions they’d had before Tren had revealed himself to the village as a cultivator.

Or before Tan had done it for them, at least.

That Pao was choosing to walk in Tren’s footsteps was both amusing and humbling. There was, in Tren’s view, no higher calling than the Dao of Bountiful Harvests. It was literally one of the four great Daos of Life.

He wished that he could guide Tan down the Dao of the Endless Breath, but alas he wasn’t familiar with that Dao. He was familiar enough with the Dao of the Azure Sky, and perhaps someday Tan would find someone to help him make the jump from that Dao to the deeper Dao of Life that went with the element that had come so naturally to him.

He shook his head and returned his musings to the sleeping child he was checking on. Pao was strong. Physically, spiritually, mentally. And he was loyal. He was not Tren’s child, but he was as close to them as siblings were to each other, and that was a relationship he would continue to nourish. Whether the boy grew up to become Tan’s shield or Safron’s spear, it was too early to say.

Perhaps he would surprise them all and father Tren’s grandchildren. It wasn’t an impossibility, but that was a long ways away.

Regardless, Pao had potential. And he was growing so fast.

Next, the twins, who shared a bedroom. The freckle-faced children who looked nearly identical but were so different in temperament.

Competative Won, he thought. He saw the boy searching for the angles, looking for advantages that weren’t there. As though this were a story, and this little farm were truly a sect where such politicing was allowed. Not that Tren was actively discouraging it, but he’d crush the boy’s expectations eventually and see what happened.

Not out of cruelty.

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No, the path that Won was walking was a dead end. It was a race to the edge of a cliff, and beyond the cliff there was nothing. No bottom, no handholds to climb down, no way to return down the path that brought you there.

Unfortunately the only way to see the cliff was to be thrown off of it and pulled back.

Competition is good, but too much salt is poison. Tren wanted competition in his household, and he’d encourage it to a point. But he would not allow Won to turn his beautiful fields baren.

And then then there was Ko. Fiesty little thing. He still got a chuckle over the sheer look of astonishment on Pao’s face when she’d kicked him in that tender spot during their match. But she was also going out of her way to nurture the younger children. She played the part of the older sister masterfully.

And like the other three of his students, she was stronger than she realized. Or she would be once she walked further down her path. Already he could sense small bubblings beneath her surface as she pondered the connections between her dao and that of the other four cultivators that she was training with.

Yes, he was well pleased with Ko. She would make a fine wife for Tan, if things didn’t work out between her and Pao. Or not. He wasn’t one to arrange his children’s futures like that. Neither the ones he’d fathered, nor the ones he’d sort of adopted.

But a subtle word of encouragement here and there, once they were old enough for such things, might not be out of place.

He smiled and moved on.

Safron was sleeping in Tan’s room, allowing Tren to contemplate both of his natural children at once. He was so damn proud of Tan’s progress. His understanding of the Dao of the Azure Sky was still that of a child. But he had both feet firmly on the path.

Or rather, he was soaring down the path without touching the ground at all, which was proper for his dao.

He smirked again at the memory of the visit from the lord. He knew perfectly well what the man had come intending to do. Throw his weight around and make a fuss before demanding some sort of obscene bribe from the farmer who was obviously too wealthy for his own good.

He also knew that only one in ten cultivators ever learned to fly. Of those, seven in ten walked the Dao of the Azure Sky. However, most of them walked it for decades, some of them centuries, before they were half as adroit in the air as Tan was at age nine.

It wasn’t a matter of power. If that was all it took, then anyone could fly. It was a matter of becoming one with the sky, part of the wind, a feather on a zephyr. It took most who mastered the technique decades to overcome the lifetime of experience that said feet belong on the ground.

Which, ironically, is why Tan had managed to do it thirty years and a realm of power sooner than most managed.

Tren sighed, smiling. Pretty soon Tan would be making the transition from the initiate’s realm into what was commonly called the realm of copper, or sometimes the novice realm. Or, in a backwater like this, it was confused with one of the higher realms such as the silver or the gold, or, alternatively, the profound or the master’s realm.

He sighed. It would help if someone codified the realms, but the fact was that every sect had their own names for the same things. Some of them claimed that the initiate’s realm had five stages, others that it had twelve or thirteen.

Tren held that it had ten, because there was a qualitative change from stage ten to eleven. A second purging of impurities from the body, and a profound improvement in metabolism.

Tan was in the seventh stage of the initiate’s realm, and at the rate he was going he would enter the next realm before he turned ten. Possibly shortly after he turned ten. Maybe before that, if he experienced a sudden breakthrough on his Dao.

Which meant that Tren would have to decide what terminology to use to prepare him for the experience.

He smiled and turned his eyes to his youngest child. His daughter. Who was soon to turn four. She was fiesty and constantly demanding attention and absolutely deserved every bit that she demanded.

And yet there was a problem.

He sighed. It wasn’t really a problem. If he was any other parent he wouldn’t even realize it.

She had a minor Qi block on her eighth meridian, by her left kidney. It shouldn’t impare her when she bound her spirit. A powerful enough spirit would correct the issue naturally within days of the successful merging, likely without the child ever being aware of the defect.

But to both of the girl’s parents, the blemish was terrifying. They’d spoken about it in hushed whispers after drawing privacy wards in the air while the children were asleep in the hours between midnight and dawn. They had sent letters to healers whom they had vowed to never contact again requesting any and all information on Qi blocks, and they had read every reply they had gotten.

And the answer was the hardest they’d ever received.

There was nothing to do until the child began to try to cultivate. Which meant that there was nothing to do but wait.

He sighed and closed the door on the sleeping children, then returned to the room he shared with his wife. She woke when he slid into bed, and they spent a while trying to expand their family once more.